High availability

You are here > >

High availability

Critical to your business success is knowing that your IT systems are always accessible and running well, whenever you need them.

Available, whenever your business needs

With hosted online services from Intercept you have the reassurance of readily available IT services supported by our near 100% uptime guarantee.

Our IT systems are designed and implemented to ensure the highest degree of operational continuity, with:

Replication of data to our disaster recovery site
Fault-tolerant IT systems
Backup and replication of critical system components
No single point of system failure
Fault containment to prevent propagation of a failure
Ability to roll-back or roll-forward software changes
Processes for proper business continuity planning

Typically, availability is expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year. The following table shows the downtime allowed for a particular percentage of availability, presuming that the system is required to operate continuously.

Our service level agreement refers to monthly downtime or availability in order to calculate our money back promise. This shows a huge difference of over 1½ hours between a 99% service guarantee and our near 100% uptime promise.

Availability %	Downtime per year	Downtime per month*	Downtime per week
99%	3.65 days	7.20 hours	1.68 hours
99.5%	1.83 days	3.60 hours	50.4 minutes
99.8%	17.52 hours	86.23 minutes	20.16 minutes
99.9% ('three nines')	8.76 hours	43.2 minutes	10.1 minutes
99.95%	4.38 hours	21.56 minutes	5.04 minutes
99.99% ('four nines')	52.6 minutes	4.32 minutes	1.01 minutes
99.999% ('five nines')	5.26 minutes	25.9 seconds	6.05 seconds
99.9999% ('six nines')	31.5 seconds	2.59 seconds	0.605 seconds

* For monthly calculations, a 30-day month is used.

Uptime and availability are not the same. Our systems can be up but not available if, for example, there is a connectivity issue at your place of work.