Four nines as you've never seen them before
Today we announced that all ForgeRock customers will enjoy a 99.99% service-level agreement (SLA). Here's why I am so excited about this announcement and what it means for our customers.
It doesn't matter how great your authentication is if it's not available.
An identity stack is essential to the survival of a digital brand. Identity architects spend a lot of time and A/B testing to ensure login experiences are safe and secure. But, no matter how great that experience is, if the identity stack becomes unavailable and users can't login, the business will be critically impacted. ForgeRock provides the front door (with respect to identity) for some of the largest brands in the world for whom availability is paramount, and we are proud to now offer a 99.99% SLA to all of our customers.
99.99% is about maturity and operational excellence.
The difference between three nines and four nines is about 40 minutes per month, but it’s actually about so much more. It's about a resilient architecture, mature automation, and proven availability over time. ForgeRock has been operating above four nines since the inception of our SaaS offering, but because we service large and critical brands, we wanted to see a long history of proven operational excellence before we stamped four nines across all our customers.
P.S. four nines doesn't matter if your transactions are throttled.
Not everyone delivers four nines the same way. And four nines doesn't matter if it comes with heavy throttling caveats – which are so common in the industry. Often, SaaS architectures put a large number of enterprise customers in a single shared pod, meaning that if one enterprise has a viral or massive-scale event, all other enterprises in the pod may get throttled for the survival of the shared resources. Technically, that's still considered four nines, but it doesn't feel like it because the throttling activity causes hiccups in availability, creates latency, and hinders the experience of your end-users.
ForgeRock pioneered a better way to provide SaaS-delivered IAM for large brands – with tenant isolation. This means we never throttle for noisy neighbor issues. Because we don’t have them. We also never share endpoints, resulting in improved security and availability. Tenant isolation also protects identity deployments from any nosey neighbor situation. ForgeRock has a rock-solid history of providing massive scale that easily manages usage spikes as we support the largest enterprises during their busiest times, such as retailers on Black Friday and global news media moments like a royal wedding. An identity platform is critical infrastructure for your brand and needs to be always on and always available, akin to a dial tone.
Protection from user error is important too.
Our SaaS comes with dev/stage/prod instances and controlled promotions between them, as well as immutable configuration in the production environment. This is critical for availability as it ensures that an identity architect doesn't accidentally fat-finger a configuration or accidentally delete critical identity data as they "swivel their chair" between deployments. This kind of configuration mishap event can render an identity system unavailable (even as your SaaS vendor meets its four nines SLA). ForgeRock believes there should be no surprises regarding what gets put into production, and we have designed our features from the bottom up to provide the strongest availability and control at every level.
Digital identity has a mission-critical job in protecting a brand. It's the digital equivalent of a front door, working continuously to welcome citizens and customers to the digital property, and working equally hard to shut out bad actors, fraudsters, and bots. This is why ForgeRock has been hard at work in providing a 99.99% SLA to all of our customers, with tenant isolation and controlled continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) promotion of changes to production to avoid any nasty surprises, like a bad configuration.
Learn more about the ForgeRock cloud architecture.
