Computer Availably 99.9%

In my experience whenever I hear an IT professionals talk about 99.9% availability in any area. I immediately question their credibility and inform who ever I am with that what we are being sold is not facts but a sales gimmick. Its' also the same type of comment saying that financial system has to be accurate to the last cent.

This sort of language works well to executive management who think having perfects systems are key to success. Once they have been sold the product the effort of getting out of the product is to expensive and when that 0.01 percent of failure is recorded it is discounted as some other factor.

I am writing this because amazon cloud services has just had major failure and it was thought to have 99.9% computer availability with some of best backup systems in the world.

This reminds me of when 9/11 occurred the companies that were able to get their systems up the fastest where the ones that were more cowboy then ones that followed strictly to audit guides by large auditors.

I miss having been told all the things my auditors i.e PWC would say about how not secure or missing procedures in our IT department. That is why this issue disturbs me so much in how IT has to do all this extra risk management stuff when we could be focusing on other things because our executive management  are being offered another silver bullet to handle issues that think will solve all their problems.

But reality for a lot of bad IT solutions its just another way to show shareholders that they are doing something constructive to fix their company.

I have totally got off topic just wan't to say that when you hear people saying that this solution will give computer availability of 99.9%  question it.