In lieu to the availability, it is the time duration the provider ensures your services are available, regardless of your cloud types (Public, Private, Community, or Hybrid) and service types (SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS). Commonly this metric is revealed with the percentage of uptime as its’ basis. Moreover, uptime is the amount of time the respective service is available and operationally online in a specific time interval. And so, if the uptime is 99.99% in a year, the total duration you will be unable to access the service, widely known as downtime, is no more than 52 minutes and 36 seconds in 12 months.

Availability of the services varies from one cloud to another cloud provider. Therefore, you need to know your availability requirements in the first place which includes but not limited to a business, mission-critical, time-critical system you have and your EXPECTED uptime/acceptable downtime.

Be mindful that the definition and measurement of availability are ALSO different from one provider to another.

That’s said, upon the identification, search for the vendor with service availability that meets or, even more, exceeds your requirements. IDEALLY, you should choose the vendor that guarantees, not only publishes, their availability means that they will compensate your organization for missing the promised metrics and thresholds. Always take a look and learn their Service Level Agreement (SLA) carefully and thoroughly. Comprehend their policies, terms, conditions and provision of compensation in case of an outage in clauses

If you are keen to understand from a technical perspective, you might want to know how the provider MANAGE the outage (unplanned downtime), their Business CONTINUITY Plan (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) and how they handle their maintenance (planned downtime) too.