To find out how SaaS organisations meet their SLAs (service level agreements) with customers and the challenges they face, the Imperva Incapsula team worked with Pagerduty to survey nearly 400 industry DevOps professionals responsible for IT, product development, network ops, engineering and e-commerce.
Findings:
* 77 percent of companies surveyed delivered only four nines (99.99 percent) SLA for website availability, meaning that their sites were offline for more than one hour per year.
* Three nines (99.9 percent) means the site or app is unavailable 10 hours per year.
Why this is important?
During Black Friday, Cyber Monday and sporting championship games, one hour translates to a great revenue loss. For example, there was a widespread SaaS outage with Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service recently, which lead to broken service on the websites, apps and devices that it relies on.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday outages and slowdowns plagued retailers such as Macy’s, Walmart and The Gap, Inc. last holiday season when their sites were overwhelmed by major traffic from holiday shoppers.
Unlike Amazon that posted updates on its sites, many of the companies surveyed did not have a status page to inform customers if their site or app was down.
The Imperva Incapsula team found that more than half (53 percent) of companies said they did not have a status page that shows website availability or downtime.
To assuage the damage of missing their SLA, 25 percent of these companies offered some form of credit or refund to customers for the inconvenience.
Bottom line
Not having an SLA or status page for availability costs companies in lost revenue, compensation and brand reputation. And, for some companies like Macy’s, it can make or break the business.
This survey shows the importance of a good user experience that includes a site being live, being available on mobile and having visibility into what the company is doing about the outage.
