Mimecast stands by 100 per cent SLA promise

Vendor vows to stick to its 100 per cent availability promise and offer compensation after coming under fire following outage

Mimecast has responded to criticism over its outage last week, vowing to make it up to its partners and customers and to stick by its 100 per cent service availability offer.

Last week, network hardware failure meant one of its datacentres went down, leaving some of its customers unable to use its email services.

During the height of the difficulties, Mimecast's chief executive apologised to its users, but defended the firm again after its SLA (service-level agreement) offer came under fire.

Just a week before the outage, Mimecast took a pot shot at Google after the search giant experienced similar difficulties earlier this month.

In a blog before its outage it was keen to boast about its 100 per cent uptime offer, branding any downtime as "expensive and disruptive". It added: "Google aside, any cloud vendor who does not meet the expectations of their customers and their market will hamper the growth of cloud for us all."

Following the outage, which left some customers without email for days, some Mimecast users took to Twitter to criticise the vendor in light of its ambitious availability claims.

IT consultant Simon Bulleyment said the outage was a "wake-up call for Mimecast... made worse by [the] 100 per cent SLA nonsense. When cloud goes wrong, on-premise looks attractive!"

Mimecast partner Your IT Man's Simon Jessop tweeted: "Mimecast – provider of email continuity service. Down for [the] past three hours. Not so 100 per cent SLA now."

Peter Bauer, Mimecast's chief executive, defended its SLA offer on the firm's blog and said it will be accountable should an outage occur.

"I would like to take the opportunity to address [the 100 per cent availability SLA], which has received a lot of attention on Twitter and in the media. There is some suggestion that a 100 per cent SLA is impossible, because there is always a chance a service will go down," he said.

"What it really means to us is a commitment to a level of service we are willing to be held accountable for. Anything less, and we pay for the shortfall.

"We give the 100 per cent SLA not because we think we are infallible, but because zero downtime is something so important to our customers and us."

On its Twitter page, Mimecast insisted it would stick by its SLA promise in the future.

Bauer added that the firm will be working with affected customers to arrange SLA compensation, but when the firm was questioned by CRN, it was unable to give any more details on reseller compensation.

Cloud vendor Workbooks said Mimecast's ambitious SLA promise made the outage even worse for customers. Its sales director Ian Moyse claimed that failure to deliver after promising such high standards makes it "triply as bad" for those affected.

Misleading?

In Mimecast's initial updates to users throughout the outage, Mimecast claimed its email services were down for three hours, but Bauer also apologised for potentially misleading users who experienced the outage for far longer.

He said the three-hour window referred to the moment the services went down to the time it completed its failover process, not how long customers had problems.

He added: "Some customers thought I was shutting down the issue and pretending the crisis had only lasted three hours. I was not trying to mislead or underplay it, but I understand how it might have looked that way. And for that, I apologise."