I’ve worked for banks, multiple large and small US healthcare-related companies, and businesses that didn’t use their software when they were closed for the night.

All of those places needed their backend systems to be up 24/7. The banks ran reports and cleared funds with nightly batches—hundreds of jobs a night for even small banking networks. The healthcare companies needed to receive claims and process patient updates (e.g. your provider’s EMR is updated if you die or have an emergency visit with another provider you authorized for records sharing—and no, this is not handled by SaaS EMRs in many cases) over night so that their systems were up to date when they next opened for business. The “regular” businesses closed for the night generated reports and frequently had IT staff doing migrations, or senior staff working on something at midnight due the next day (when the head of marketing is burning the midnight oil on that presentation, you don’t want to be the person explaining that she can’t do it because the file server hosting the assets is down all the time after hours).

And again, that’s the norm I’ve heard described from nearly everyone in software/IT that I know: most businesses expect (and are willing to pay for or at least insist on) 24/7 uptime for their computer systems. That seems true across the board: for big/small/open/closed-off-hours/international/single-timezone businesses alike.

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runako a day ago | parent | next [-]

You are right that a lot of systems at a lot of places need 24x7. Obviously.

But there are also a not-insignificant number of important systems where nobody is on a pager, where there is no call rotation[1]. Computers are much more reliable than they were even 20 years ago. It is an Acceptable Business Choice to not have 24x7 monitoring for some subset of systems.

Until very recently[2], Citibank took their public website/user portal offline for hours a week.

1 - if a system does not have a fully staffed call rotation with escalations, it's not prepared for a real off-hours uptime challenge 2 - they may still do this, but I don't have a way to verify right now.

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sixdonuts 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thousands of orgs have full stack OT/CI apps/services that must run 24/7 365 and are run fully on premise.

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stickfigure a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This lasts right up until an important customer can't access your services. Executives don't care about downtime until they have it, then they suddenly care a lot.

	▲	true_religion a day ago \| parent [-]
		You can often have services available for VIPs, and be down for the public. Unless there's a misconfiguration, usually apps are always visible internally to staff, so there's an existing methodology to follow to make them visible to VIPs. But sometimes none of that is necessary. I've seen at a 1B market cap company, a failure case where the solution was manual execution by customer success reps while the computers were down. It was slower, but not many people complained that their reports took 10 minutes to arrive after being parsed by Eye Ball Mk 1s, instead of the 1 minute of wait time they were used to.

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chickensong a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Uptime is also a sales and marketing point, regardless of real-world usage. Business folks in service-providing companies will usually expect high availability by default, only tempered by the cost and reality of more nines.

Also, in addition to perception/reputation issues, B2B contracts typically include an SLA, and nobody wants to be in breach of contract.

I think the parent you're replying to is wrong, because I've worked at small companies selling into large enterprise, and the expectation is basically 24/7 service availability, regardless of industry.