Previously, I was discussing Availability vs Uptime. I would like to continue that discussion by talking about the components of the NICE network.
In a SaaS environment, there are many components that contribute to the overall experience and performance of the SaaS services. Those include the customer’s network, third party service providers and the network and systems of the SaaS provider. At NICE we have an extensive data network that is comprised of multiple ISPs connected to a highly available, high performance data network. That is married to a carrier grade computer network that runs software that is designed to be redundant and fault tolerant. Finally, paired to this data and computer network is a redundant long distance telecommunications network. All of these components, providers and design were selected with performance and availability in mind.
Because of our design, even if there are internet, carrier, hardware or software problems, we expect to be able to handle and deliver 99.99% of all contacts that are delivered to our platform. We track and measure this each month by analyzing all events and determining the source of the problem or "the cause", how and if it affected contacts and customers and for how long. Based upon the source of the problem, such as the data network, voice network or the NICE platform, we determine and measure the availability of that particular component. Therefore we track and measure the availability of our data network, our voice network and the NICE platform with its own availability score.
At NICE, we believe that if you don’t measure something, you cannot improve it. Every month we determine the availability of our various systems and we grade ourselves, because we know our customers are grading us too. We review these numbers, analyze where and why we had problems and how we are going to improve that grade. As a customer or a prospective customer, we know that grade is important to you too. It means you can be confident in NICE and its services.
