Over 200,000 businesses ran over 10 million troubleshooting sessions in 2014. While it gives us enormous pride of the number of people who rely on us every day, we recognise the huge responsibility to meet and exceed customers’ rising expectations. That’s why we have invested a lot of money and effort to provide a trustworthy and reliable remote access service. The 2014 availability fits with the ISL Online SLA 99.95 percent uptime, but most importantly it convinces users of the service quality.

ISL Online availability 2010 – 2014
The ISL Online availability over the past five years has been impressive, also when compared to the big players like Amazon at 2.43 hours of downtime in 2014, Google at 4.43 hours, and Microsoft at 39.63 downtime hours (read Cloud Outage Audit for 2014). Our operations team did a stellar job of keeping it at 99.95 and higher, whereas the number of hours when the service was down even dropped below half of an hour between 2011 and 2013. Overall, ISL Online service availability is doing great and has been getting even better over the years.

In all of 2010, ISL Online cloud experienced only 2.92 hours downtime, giving it a very good 99.9667 uptime percentage. Over the next three years, from 2011 to 2013, ISL Online maintained an outstanding 0.438 hours of downtime and almost approached what some consider the Holy Grail of availability: five nines, well, ISL Online achieved amazing four nines with the 99.995% uptime.

In 2014, ISL Online recorded 4.38 hours of downtime across 3 outages, meaning it was up and running 99.95% of the time. Full 4 hours were due to a security certificate expiry incident, while the rest of the downtime, 22 minutes, resulted as a partial website failure, which substantially slowed down the remote access connections.

Downtime in 2014
The main reason for downtime last year – the security certificate, built in the ISL Light remote desktop application as a guarantee of authenticity of transmission through the AES 256-Bit End-to-End Encryption tunnel, didn’t pose, however, any threats of data exposure or security compromise, but was simply set to expire on March 1, 2014. That in turn started blocking the use of the remote desktop service as soon as the clock turned midnight. Four hours later SaaS users got an update automatically since it was deployed to the ISL Online cloud, while the self-hosted users (Server License) needed to upgrade manually, but got it completely free of charge. De facto, only a handful of SaaS users ever noticed the downtime as it happened outside normal business hours for Europe and the USA.

The certificate failure aside, ISL Online users enjoyed a stable remote desktop service all year round, experiencing only two other partial short-term website failures. These altogether contributed to a little over 20 minutes of a more troublesome access to the service, but did not result in a complete breakdown. Consequently, the tech supporters who wanted to start the service through their web account, and the clients who wanted to enter a remote support session through the web, experienced really sluggish connectivity and service as opposed to the otherwise high speed connections and seamless desktop sharing. All the same, ISL Online service availability would have achieved an amazing 99.996 percentage in 2014 if it hadn’t been for the certificate issue.

All in all, we are doing our best and try to do even better year after year after year. Stay tuned for how ISL Online is doing this year for I have a great feeling we are beating the uptime record.