Vendors of any application or service delivered via the cloud realize that they are often held to a higher standard than on-premise software providers, but in the wake of recent outages at Intuit, the issue of what vendors in the space must do to address downtime events - planned or otherwise - has been pushed into the spotlight.

As included in cloud-vendor service-level agreements (SLAs), "uptime" is a critical metric and there are few vendors, if any, who promise less than 98 percent uptime. Should those levels dip or in the event of any unplanned or sudden downtime or outages, there's usually some level of compensation on the part of the vendor - monetary or otherwise.

This is usually standard practice, since most vendors offer a subscription model for hosted or pure cloud-based services.

Most cloud vendors will admit that 100 percent uptime, while ideal, is not likely for the foreseeable future, as most schedule several hours of downtime over the course of a year for periodic maintenance and upgrades.

In the case of QuickBooks parent Intuit, the company experienced unplanned service outages in June that made headlines, and another in July that was more short-lived. For two days in June, Intuit.com and some of its major Web sites, including QuickBooks Online, Intuit Online Payroll, Quicken and QuickBase, were down for two days following a power outage.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Intuit has more than 300,000 customers using its online network of small-business applications, and has been moving more of its products online as part of its Connected Services strategy.

The company explained that the outage occurred during routine maintenance. An accidental power failure at that time affected Intuit's primary and backup systems, taking a number of Intuit corporate Web sites and services offline.

Intuit president and chief executive Brad Smith apologized on the company's blog for the outage, saying, "There is simply no excuse for having such a negative impact on you."

In July the company experienced another, albeit shorter, outage that knocked out service for a few hours.

During that time, company spokesman Rich Walker said that customer communication was key. "Over the past month, we've communicated the news of our outages, updated our customers when we restored services and re-assured them that their data was not lost. Details have been available through various communications from our executives and on our community sites," he said. "The outages were not related, and we have learned that we need to accelerate our continuous journey to re-architect our products, modernize our technology to host them, and build or lease state-of-the-art data centers to house our online services."

As to their efforts to help prevent such downtime events going forward, Smith stated: "Efforts are already underway. Many of our new online products are architected and designed with 24-7, high-availability and disaster recovery in mind. We've already invested more than $300 million in new facilities, including two state-of-the-art data centers in Quincy, Wash., and Las Vegas. We are aggressively migrating our existing applications to these data centers."

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