We all live in a world that has lots of moving parts. And sometimes, when one of those moving parts fails, it can have a big impact on us. Here are just a few recent examples from 2021 alone:
- Last week, an outage with Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused disruptions for companies including Instacart, Roku, Disney+, PayPal, and major airlines.
An October 2021 outage put social media giant Facebook out of commission for several hours, along with related products such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
In June of 2021, a bug originating with content delivery network Fastly shut down numerous Internet sites including CNN, Hulu, Spotify and many others.
Speaking in Marketwatch about the first of these outages, technologist Carl Malmud points out that the Internet was intended to be a distributed network with no single point of failure – and that there are dangers when we don’t follow that basic principle.
We would like to circle this issue around to something that matters a great deal to our own customers: what is the risk of using a third-party provider for real-time services, such as our suite of contact data validation products?
We can actually answer that question. Our systems and our infrastructure are engineered to limit the risk of an outage to less than 0.001% percent of the time. And we back that commitment with the industry’s only financially backed service level agreement (SLA). In this article, we will discuss the technology and infrastructure that makes this commitment possible.
What’s behind our amazing reliability
Service Objects services are mission-critical to the companies we serve, which include some of the world’s major technology, service and financial firms such as Microsoft, Amazon, American Express and MasterCard – not to mention many smaller firms that depend on us for marketing campaigns, order fulfillment, or just about anything else that involves a contact record.
This means that we don’t cut corners, or put all our eggs in one basket when it comes to our own computing power – the key to our reliability rests with a hardened, dedicated, redundant infrastructure. Here are some of the details:
We are on our own metal. We don’t depend on Amazon, Google or anyone else for our cloud computing. We manage our servers and control our own resources.
We control the load balancing. Our resources are dedicated to us, period. No one, but no one, shares our bandwidth. This means that our computing power is solely for the use of our services – and ultimately, our customers.
Our systems are redundant. We have three different data centers, in three locations, run by three different major hosting providers. It’s a lot more work to run your own data centers, but the reliability is worth it.
We employ bank-grade security. Our data centers employ best practices for data security, including 24/7/365 staffing, locked servers, biometric access, and video surveillance, along with the highest level of encryption and the latest security tools. You can find out more about our security practices here.
More than a promise – a guarantee
Of course, customers don’t care about our infrastructure – they care about their uptime. This is why we back all of our services with an ironclad guarantee that credits real service fees in the unlikely event that you experience unplanned downtime. You can read the details of this guarantee, including terms, conditions and reimbursement, on our dedicated Service Level Agreement page.
Outages are real, expensive, and happen far too often in the real world. And they can impact your business in a big way. That is why we work hard to maintain an infrastructure that gives you the confidence to keep your data accurate, genuine and up to date, every day of the year – and this will always be our commitment to you.
Want to know more about the infrastructure that supports are mission-critical services? Reach out and we would be happy to discuss them with you.
