This is a killer question, since Office 365 applications are generally business critical. Imagine the cost to your business of half a day with no email!

Video transcript

OK so another big part of any service is how reliable is that service.

Well there’s the million dollar question of course. Microsoft have over the last few years, published a lot more information on their uptime and there are some great resources that you can go and have a look at. So just got some information here, the Trust Centre. If you search for Microsoft Trust Centre and have a look there, you’ll find lots of information about how they supply their SLAs, how they measure their SLAs and their recent reporting. There are two other things as well that are worth noting. They have an admin app that (when you’re a user) will give you any alerts of any service affecting issues and they have a Health Centre where you can see what’s going on in your own particular application. So for the last couple of years, to answer your specific question, Microsoft guarantee an uptime of 99.9%. So what does that mean? Across a year we have something like 8,800 hours in total. So Microsoft are guaranteeing across a whole year that there would be a maximum of just over 8.5 hours downtime in total across the year. In the last two years, the average has actually been much better than that. They have actually achieved a 99.98% average uptime, which is just 1.45 hours downtime across a year as a whole. So really, it’s a business critical service and you’re getting a very high level of performance.

It’s great to hear they’re taking it so seriously and I think the other thing to note as well, is that those SLAs are financially backed. Which is another thing that shows how much confidence Microsoft has in its own services.