Availability describes the extent to which the FACT24 systems are operational within a specific period, and is a key performance indicator of the quality of our service. The availability guaranteed by F24 AG can be examined at any time on the basis of the following documentation.

Guaranteed Availability

The sophisticated structure of our security and backup systems is based on redundancy throughout the entire process chain (sites - systems – network providers). It enables us to provide our customers with contractually guaranteed availability of 99.98% for all alerting and telephone conference processes (telephony), and 98% for the Internet-based administration and activation of FACT24. These figures refer to a period of one year in each case.

Documented Availability

Since December 2006 we have monitored and documented FACT24’s availability on a monthly basis. These figures are available to the public at all times.

	Availability Telephony and Internet October 2009			Monthly average since 01/11/2008
	Operating time : 744 h			Operating time : 8.760 h
	Availability in h	Downtime in h	Availability in %	Actual availability in %	Guaranteed availability in %
Administration
Internet	744:00	0:40	99,910	99,940	98.00
Operating
Telephony	744:00	0:00	100	100	99.98
Internet	744:00	0:40	99,910	99,989	98.00

Surveillance of telephony systems

The standards which apply to this process comply with our in-house quality assurance. Unfortunately, we were unable to find an external provider which complied with our requirements for the availability of testing and inspection systems. F24 AG therefore conducts system surveillance and monitoring itself, with the following procedure:

All computer systems connected to the telephone network are called from the public telephone network at least every five minutes.
Surveillance is undertaken by systems at different sites, ensuring that they are permanently in contact with each other.
Availability of the international activation number +0800…(UIFN) is also monitored but not displayed separately. Further nationally applicable service numbers are currently not within the scope of the monitoring process.
In general, when a system is called up it launches a test routine. In positive cases, the system accepts the call. If the system is non-operational, the call is refused and an escalation process is immediately triggered.

Telephony failure occurs if all sites are non-operational simultaneously. In this case, alerting could not be carried out!

Surveillance of Internet systems

Availability checks of our Internet systems are performed by an external provider. The following sites are monitored:

https://fact24.f24.com (administration)
Failure of this Web application results in inability to enter and manage data in the FACT24 profile.
https://fact24.f24.com/activate (operating)
In the event of failure of this interface, a backup interface (https://www2.f24.com/activate) is available. If neither system is operational, activation of FACT24 via Internet is not possible.