{"id":10,"date":"2013-08-08T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-08T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/2013\/08\/08\/cloud-services-you-can-trust-office-365-availability\/"},"modified":"2022-06-28T10:47:41","modified_gmt":"2022-06-28T17:47:41","slug":"cloud-services-you-can-trust-office-365-availability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-ie\/microsoft-365\/blog\/2013\/08\/08\/cloud-services-you-can-trust-office-365-availability\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloud services you can trust: Office 365 availability"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Your complete office in the cloud” is how we think of Microsoft Office 365. While it gives us enormous pride that one billion people use Office, we deeply appreciate the responsibility we have to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations every day. We recognize that productivity apps are mission critical; using them is how work gets done. It is imperative for us to ensure our service is trustworthy and reliable while we continue to add new capabilities to Office 365<\/a>. Our measure for this is service availability.<\/p>\n

Office 365 availability<\/h3>\n

Since launching Office 365 two years ago, we have continued to invest deeply in our\u00a0infrastructure to ensure a highly available service.\u00a0 While\u00a0information has been available in detail for our current customers, today we’re making this information\u00a0available to all customers\u00a0considering Office 365.\u00a0\u00a0 We measure availability as the number of minutes that the Office 365 service is available in a calendar month as a percentage of the total number of minutes in that month.\u00a0 We call this measure of availability the uptime number. Within this calculation we include our business, government and education services. The worldwide uptime number for Office 365\u00a0for the last four quarters beginning July 2012 and ending June 2013 has been 99.98%, 99.97%, 99.94% <\/b>and 99.97% <\/b>respectively.\u00a0 Going forward we will disclose uptime numbers on a quarterly basis on the Office 365 Trust Center<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here are a few more details about the uptime number:<\/p>\n

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  1. The uptime number includes Exchange<\/a>, SharePoint<\/a>, Lync and Office Web Apps, weighted on the number of people using each of these services. Customers use these services together, so all of these are taken into account while calculating uptime.<\/li>\n
  2. This uptime number applies to Office 365 for business, education and government. We do not include consumer services in this calculation.<\/li>\n
  3. Office 365 ProPlus<\/a> is an integral part of our service offering but is not included in this calculation of uptime since it largely runs on the users’ devices.<\/li>\n
  4. Individual customers may experience higher or lower uptime percentages compared to the global uptime numbers depending on location and usage patterns.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    As a commitment to running a highly available service, we have a Service Level Agreement<\/a>\u00a0of 99.9% that is financially backed.<\/p>\n

    Availability design principles<\/h3>\n

    We have been building enterprise-class solutions for decades. In addition, Microsoft runs a number of cloud services like Office 365, Windows Azure, CRM Online, Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Bing, Skype and Xbox Live to\u00a0 name a few. We benefit from this diversity of services, leveraging best practices from each service across the others improving both the design of the software as well as operational processes.<\/p>\n

    Below are some examples of best practices applied in design and operational processes for Office 365.<\/p>\n

    Redundancy.<\/strong> Redundancy at every layer–physical, data and functional:<\/p>\n