The 99.99% SLA, decoded: what financially-backed uptime means

"99.99% uptime" sounds absolute. It isn't — it's a budget. Four nines allows roughly 52 minutes of downtime a year. The question isn't whether something can go wrong; it's what happens in those minutes, and who's on the hook.

Recovery objective, not just availability

Availability is the platform being up. What you actually care about is your recovery objective: how recent your last good copy is (RPO) and how fast you're running again (RTO). DDSArk's median restore time is 11 min (median time to recover a full practice server, per DDSArk restore tests).

"Financially backed" is the real signal

Any vendor can print a number. A financially-backed SLA means the vendor pays when they miss — which is the only thing that reliably aligns their incentives with yours. Read that clause first.