Re: Obligatory "Office 365" Joke
To be honest, I'm only running a tiny little place here (a prep school) but:
Better than 1 day of downtime a year in the last few years (in fact, I'd say about 48 hours total over those years over 4-5 incidents).
Now I'm not running any number of seriously major services, but I have websites, databases, 100's of people accessing information 24/7, remote desktops, in-house desktops, hundreds of mobile devices, email, etc. etc. etc.
The day of downtime is usually only "the power is going off" (notification from the electricity board) and it's usually a Saturday (so not at all critical).
Achieving decent uptime isn't difficult. GUARANTEEING it is incredibly difficult. I couldn't, at any point, have GUARANTEED we'd be up the next day to any serious extent. The leased lines aren't THAT reliable. The servers might well fall over. I could easily fudge the network config and take things down. Microsoft could de-activate all my servers. There's a range of things outside my reasonable control as just an IT department.
But *achieving* better rates than that isn't difficult. Does that give me place to trash-talk MS? In jest, sure. In all seriousness, no, we're in entirely different businesses with entirely different requirements.
What irks me, though, is companies complaining about 365 Exchange downtime when they don't have any other kind of backup. Is it not possible to have a local Exchange server work in collaboration with the 365 Exchange to ensure you're up even when it's down? Or to failover your MX to the secondary mail for your domain? I thought this was the first lesson in "enterprise IT", no?
Use 365/Azure, by all means. But there's nothing stopping you having backups, alternatives, failovers, secondaries etc. to keep yourself running.
Complaining that your single points of failure are down is really a show that you didn't specify the system well enough to start.