Can you afford taking your site down for a day?

Technology failure can be costly.

A single failed router led to 2,300 canceled flights and tens of millions of dollars in losses for Southwest Airlines and a similar incident over at rival Delta Airlines a month later caused $150 million in losses.

And retailers, including industry giants, are in a similar boat, with users encountering frequent outages or slowdowns during peak periods.

And these are man-made failures, brought about by mistakes or oversights. Things can get quite a bit more sporting when Mother Nature gets involved. Much of Florida is still without power nearly two weeks after hurricane Irma struck and five years ago hurricane Sandy caused similar chaos in New York.

Designing, engineering, and maintaining resilient systems with adequate scale and redundancy can be complex, not to mention expensive. So, increasingly, companies are turning to shared services, cloud computing, and SaaS (Software as a Service) providers to ensure their online operations are resilient as well as cost-effective.

By combining distributed hosting in the cloud with SaaS solutions specifically designed and optimized to maximize the advantage this offers, companies get the benefit of both: a proven, reliable system running in an environment that provides maximum flexibility, robustness, and the ability to scale as needed when demand spikes. All for a fraction of the cost if they had to maintain this environment themselves.

And, while no approach will prevent every outage, spreading the risk across multiple locations and systems can at least mitigate the impact. And, let’s face it, cloud hosting and SaaS solution vendors who have system performance and resilience at the very core of their business are almost certainly better equipped to deal with ensuring maximum uptime.