Digital service uptime must be top of the boardroom agenda

The tech sector often speaks about IT as a fourth utility alongside gas, electricity and water. But these are highly regulated industries. Some tech firms that provide systems to customers in regulated industries clearly need to comply with the required regulations, but tech as a whole is largely unregulated.

When the water mains burst or there is a power cut, these are considered major incidents. Many people and businesses are impacted and there may be a risk to life or property damage arising from the incident. An IT outage also has a significant impact and the more society relies on IT, the greater the effect. So when Cloudflare failed every organisation that uses the service was impacted, and the customers of those businesses also faced a denial of service.

This is not the first major outage that illustrates the fragility of modern digital society. AWS and Azure have both experienced recent outages. As IT becomes integral to a modern digital-first society, such outages are simply unacceptable.

The industry’s response is to recommend that businesses impacted by the disruption have backup services they can switch over to if the main service fails. In effect, run dual redundancy with a duplicate of every software and hardware component that fails-over automatically if the main service misses a beat.

The excuse the tech sector gives for doubling up this way is to avoid relying on a sole technology provider for a key service. But as Forrester principal analyst Brent Ellis notes: “Resilience isn’t free and businesses will need to decide if they want to make the investment in alternative service providers.”

Let’s see how that works outside of IT, with customers of electricity, gas and water? Apart from datacentres, which do double up on everything, most people and businesses rely on a single water supply and a single supply of gas and electricity. When the supply is offline, it’s a major problem and the utility provider risks a hefty fine.

The tech sector argues that it is contractually obliged to deliver availability based on an agreed service level agreement. The gold standard of “five nines” or 99.999% uptime means that the service is only unavailable for about five minutes a year. Is that acceptable? Probably, but we live in a 24 by seven global economy and no one can anticipate when a customer will want to use a digital service.

What’s needed is a grown up conversation about digital services availability. Service downtime should be taken as seriously at board-level as a direct cyber attack because in this day and age, if your strategic service provider is offline, it is still a denial of service for you, your employees and your customers.