Service resilience

Our cloud services are highly resilient, operating across multiple Microsoft Azure data centers in the UK, EU, and USA. If the primary data center were to fail in a given region, our services would almost instantly failover to a redundant data center within the same region. In the last 5 years, our cloud services have had an average uptime of 99.98%. That said, it is still essential to understand the impact of a possible interruption on you. Our cloud services have three main functions:

• License validation

• Product configuration

• Microsoft Graph notification subscription and relay service

License validation and product configuration are both one-off actions performed when a user signs in for the first time to map their drives. As such, an outage would have to coincide with this exact moment for there to be an issue. If it does, the user would experience a temporary delay in their ability to access their mapped drives. OneDrive, SharePoint Online and Teams would all remain accessible via a browser, but the affected user's mapped drives will not appear until our cloud services are back online. Drive mapping would not be affected if our cloud services experienced an outage while you or your users were already signed on.

The Microsoft Graph notification subscription and relay service is an ongoing process rather than a one-off action. If an outage were to occur during your online session, Cloud Drive Mapper (CDM) will stop receiving silent notifications from Microsoft Graph. These silent notifications alert CDM about changes to folders or files in Microsoft 365. An outage could result in a temporary delay between the local file system and Microsoft 365. However, CDM is not wholly vulnerable to outages of this kind as it also has an in-built system of triggering delta-checks for changes in the cloud. This happens based on internal timers and in response to different cues.

CDM is a robust solution with highly available and resilient cloud services performing limited functionality. Even a full outage of our cloud services across multiple data centers would likely have limited negative consequences for most users.

One of the most impactful, albeit uncommon, types of outages is one affecting whole Azure data centers. In this scenario, our cloud services' high availability design means that they automatically failover to redundant Azure data centers running in parallel in the same regional jurisdictions. In other words, we run our services in two data centers in the US, two in the UK and two in the EU. However, in this scenario, what we've seen in the past is that CDM stays available, but the Microsoft 365 services it's connecting to become unavailable. For obvious reasons, there is only a limited amount we can do when Microsoft 365 itself suffers outages. Our support team does its best to notify customers of these events through our online status page. CDM itself can run offline to a degree, maintaining drive stability and queuing updates until Microsoft 365 is restored.