What 100% Uptime Really Means For CPA Firms (And How To Actually Achieve It)

What separates firms that glide through peak season from those scrambling to recover lost days.

It is March 10, two weeks before the corporate filing deadline. Staff are in early, returns are queued, e-file acknowledgments are flowing, and your client portal is full of last-minute uploads.

At 9:15 a.m., your tax and accounting applications stop responding. The terminal server hangs, files are locked, and your team cannot even open email properly. What is described as a “brief outage” by your IT provider stretches into three hours of lost work and mounting frustration.

For a typical small professional services business, that is inconvenient. For a CPA firm in peak season, the impact is very different.

Deadlines are fixed, penalties for late filings are real, and clients who experience repeated delays start questioning whether their data and their deadlines are safe with you. The ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Report suggests that even small businesses can lose tens of thousands of dollars from just a few hours of downtime once you account for idle staff, delayed work, and the time spent catching up later.

This is why “100% uptime for CPA firms” has become such a common promise in marketing for accounting IT and cloud hosting. The phrase sounds absolute, but very few firms stop to ask what it actually means in practice, what level of availability they really need, and what it takes architecturally to get anywhere close to “always on” during tax season.

At a basic level, uptime is simply the percentage of time your critical systems are available and usable. For an accounting or tax practice, those systems are usually your:

• Tax software
• Accounting platform
• Workpapers
• Document management system
• Client portal
• Email

When any of those are down, your firm is effectively down. When they are down during January through April or during payroll processing windows, the damage is multiplied.

The challenge is that many providers advertise “high uptime” or a “server uptime guarantee” without explaining how they can achieve such efficiency. Mentioning 100 percent uptime is convenient. Yet it is really hard to quantify this claim without solid data to back their claim.

On paper those numbers all look impressive. In reality, the gap between them can be the difference between an occasional short disruption that your team barely notices and a multi-hour outage in March that wipes out a full morning of billable work.

If you are a partner, firm owner, or administrator in a CPA practice, this is written for you.

• You rely on your systems being up so your team can work, especially when everyone is remote or spread across offices.
• You do not need to be fluent in infrastructure or networking to make good calls about uptime.
• You just need a clear picture of what you are really buying, what it protects you from, and where the gaps still sit.

Get answers of these questions, later in this guide:

• What “uptime” and “availability” actually mean in the context of a CPA firm, not a generic small business
• How 99.0, 99.9, 99.99 and 99.999 percent translate into real hours of uptime, and what that looks like in March and April
• Why accounting and tax firms need a higher bar than a typical office or professional services business
• What it genuinely takes to get close to always-on service, from private cloud design and redundancy to monitoring and managed IT
• Which parts of uptime your provider owns and which parts still sit on your side of the fence

Uptime 101 for CPA Firms: What it Means and Why is it Important?

At its core, uptime is simply the percentage of time your critical systems are available and usable. For a CPA or tax firm, that usually means your tax software, accounting platform, workpapers, document management system, client portal, email, and in some cases your phone system. When any of these are down, your firm is effectively down, even if the lights are on and staff are in the office.

Most providers talk about uptime in percentages and acronyms, which makes it harder than it needs to be. Before you look at a “server uptime guarantee” or a “99.99 percent SLA,” it helps to translate the terminology into what it actually means for your day-to-day work.

Here is a simple reference table you can keep in mind:

Term	What it means for your firm
Uptime	Percentage of time your systems are up, reachable, and working as expected in the period being measured.
Downtime	Periods when systems are unavailable or unusable, whether planned or unplanned.
Availability	The real-world experience of staff being able to log in and do their work without disruption.
SLA (Service Level Agreement)	The formal commitment from your provider about minimum uptime and how they measure it.
100% uptime	A practical design goal and marketing shorthand, not a literal, enforceable “zero minutes ever” guarantee.

For CPA firms, the key point is that uptime is not abstract. If your team cannot open returns, pull prior year workpapers, or access your portal, your effective uptime at that moment is zero, regardless of what the SLA says on paper. That is why the details of what is covered under an “uptime SLA for accounting firms” matter as much as the headline percentage.

Why Your Experience Can Differ From the SLA

Another source of confusion is that an uptime SLA usually covers only part of what your staff experiences. A typical cloud or hosting SLA focuses on the provider’s data centers, servers, storage, and core network. If those systems are up and reachable from the internet, the provider considers that “available,” even if:

• Your office internet is down or unstable.
• A firewall or VPN misconfiguration is blocking traffic.
• A local device issue, such as a failing laptop or malware, is stopping staff from working.

From the firm’s perspective, it does not matter whether an outage is technically “on the provider side” or “on your side.” If your people cannot do their jobs, it feels like downtime. This is where the distinction between availability and SLA matters.

• Availability is what your partners and staff care about: can they log in, open files, and submit returns.
• SLA uptime is what your provider is contractually measured against on their side of the infrastructure.

Closing the gap between those two is one of the main reasons many firms move from a basic hosting arrangement to a more complete model that combines private cloud hosting with managed IT services for accounting firms. When the same specialist partner is responsible for the platform and for supporting your endpoints, networks, and users, it becomes easier to move from impressive percentages on paper to near “always on” availability in real life.

Why Uptime Stakes are Higher for CPA Firms than Other Businesses

For most small businesses, a short outage is disruptive. For CPA firms, the same outage can collide with fixed IRS and state deadlines, e-filing cutoffs, and client expectations in March and April. The result is not just delayed work but potential penalties, late night catch-up, and real reputational damage, which is why uptime that might be acceptable for a generic office is often nowhere near enough for a tax and accounting practice.

Regulatory and Security Overlay: Why Uptime is also a Compliance Issue

Accounting firms do not just hold “business data”. They hold taxpayer and financial data that is explicitly covered by IRS and FTC rules. The same frameworks you already know from security conversations have an uptime angle as well:

• IRS Publication 4557 expects firms to safeguard taxpayer data with controls over access, storage, and transmission.
• FTC Safeguards Rule extends to tax preparers and mandates a written information security program that includes access controls, monitoring, and incident response.
• Your WISP (written information security plan) ties these requirements together inside the firm.

On the surface, these are security and privacy obligations. In practice, the controls you implement to satisfy them affect operational resilience:

• Multi-factor authentication and proper access management reduce the chance that a security incident will take your systems offline.
• Centralized logging and monitoring help you detect issues before they become extended outages.
• Documented backup, restore, and incident response processes reduce recovery time if something does go wrong.

There is also a growing link between security incidents and downtime costs. Industry data shows that for many organizations, including smaller ones, estimated costs of IT downtime have climbed into the six figure per hour range once lost productivity and recovery efforts are included.

For CPA firms, this means an outage triggered by a ransomware event or security misconfiguration is not only expensive in billable hours. It also raises questions about whether taxpayer data has been properly safeguarded under the rules that govern your practice.

When you put these pieces together, uptime for a CPA firm sits at the intersection of:

• Deadline management
• Client experience
• Talent model and remote work strategy
• Regulatory expectations and security posture

That is why generic “small business” uptime targets and support models tend to underperform in the accounting world. 

What 100% Uptime Really Means in Practice for an Accounting Firm

When a provider says they deliver “100% uptime for CPA firms,” it sounds binary. Either it is up or it is down. In practice, there are three different concepts behind that phrase:

• The design of the system
• The SLA that is written into your contract
• The uptime the provider has actually delivered over time

Design Target vs. SLA vs. Observed Performance

A useful way to unpack any uptime claim is to separate these three layers.

Concept	What it is	What you should look for
Design target	How the infrastructure is engineered to behave	No single point of failure on the provider side
SLA (contract)	The formal uptime commitment, in percentage terms	Clear 99.9, 99.99, or 99.999 figure, with defined measurement
Observed performance	What the provider has actually delivered over years	Multi-year track record, ideally documented for busy seasons

For a CPA firm, the design target is about how the provider has built their private cloud platform. Are your applications and data sitting on a single physical server, or on highly available infrastructure with built-in redundancy and failover inside a SOC 2 Type II environment.

The SLA is the number most firms focus on. A 99.999 percent uptime SLA for accounting cloud hosting is very different from a generic “best effort” statement or a vague “high availability” promise. At five nines (term used to denote 99.999% availability), the provider is contractually limiting their own allowed downtime to roughly five minutes per year on the hosting side.

Observed performance is the reality check. A provider can have an ambitious SLA and a weaker track record, or a strong track record that goes beyond what the SLA strictly requires. In a managed IT provider like Verito’s case, VeritSpace is backed by a 100 percent uptime SLA and has delivered 100 percent uptime on core hosting since 2016 on the provider side. 

That does not mean nothing ever goes wrong anywhere. It does mean the underlying hosting platform for tax and accounting workloads has been engineered and operated to behave like it is always on.

What Counts as Downtime in Typical SLAs

Even when the SLA number is strong, the fine print matters. Most cloud and hosting SLAs for accounting firms define downtime in a narrow way that covers only provider-side failures, such as a data center outage or a platform incident.

You can think of it as two buckets.

Included in most uptime SLAs	Typically outside the SLA but still real downtime for you
Data center power or cooling failure	Your office or home internet connection going down
Hypervisor, server, or storage failure at the provider	Local firewall, router, or Wi-Fi issues
Provider network outage inside their own environment	ISP routing problems between your office and the data center
Platform-level software outage on the hosting stack	User device failures, malware, or unpatched laptops
Planned maintenance that overruns published windows	Misconfigured VPNs, remote desktop clients, or authentication tools

From a partner’s perspective, this distinction often feels academic. If your team cannot open their tax software or access the portal, it is downtime. From an SLA perspective, the provider may not be “down” unless their monitoring shows that their own platform is unreachable from the internet.

This gap is one of the main reasons many firms eventually move beyond pure hosting to a combined model where the same specialist partner is responsible for both the private cloud and managed IT services. When one team owns the data center stack, the endpoint protection, and the network configuration, there is less room for finger pointing and more incentive to solve the availability problem end-to-end.

It also matters for root cause analysis. Industry reports find that a large share of outages are tied to human error, configuration issues, or network problems, rather than catastrophic provider failures. An Uptime Institute report estimates that human error is involved in roughly two-thirds to four-fifths of downtime incidents, with failures to follow procedures as a leading cause, and networking problems are a growing contributor to outages. 

A strong uptime story has to address that broader reality, not just publish a percentage.

A Working Uptime Definition CPAs Can Use

Working definition: For a CPA firm, “100% uptime” should mean that during the periods that matter most to the firm, it is extremely unlikely that provider-side hosting issues will prevent staff from accessing core tax, accounting, and document systems, and that any incidents that do occur are rare, short, and recovered from quickly with clear communication.

When you evaluate providers against that definition, you can ask focused questions:

• How is your platform architectured to avoid single points of failure?
• What is your formal SLA, and how much downtime does that allow per year?
• What has your observed uptime been for the last three to five busy seasons?
• How do you handle maintenance in January to April, and what safeguards prevent planned work from becoming a surprise outage?
• What scope of incidents are covered by your uptime SLA for accounting firms, and what sits outside it?

The Hidden Cost Of Downtime For CPA Firms

Most firms look at downtime as “a bad day in IT.” The real impact is bigger. Once you add lost billable hours, overtime, rework, and client fallout, even a single incident in a busy season can rival the annual cost of robust cloud and IT services.

Direct Financial Costs

There are two layers of direct cost: the obvious lost time, and the less obvious catch up and remediation work.

A simple way to see it is to break costs into buckets:

Cost category	What it includes	Why it matters for CPAs
Lost billable hours	Staff unable to work during the outage	Immediate write-off of revenue
Catch-up overtime	Evenings and weekends required to recover lost time	Higher payroll, higher fatigue
IT remediation and recovery	Emergency vendor work, data recovery, incident response	Unplanned expense on top of lost revenue
Slowed work after the outage	Staff working less efficiently while systems stabilize	Hidden productivity loss over several days
Delayed projects and write-offs	Work pushed into less billable or non-billable time	Margin erosion on fixed-fee engagements

Industry data shows how fast these numbers escalate once you scale up headcount and complexity. A long-running ITIC survey reports that over 90 percent of organizations now estimate a single hour of downtime costs more than 300,000 dollars, and that even smaller businesses with under 25 employees can see downtime costs around 100,000 dollars per hour when you factor in lost productivity and recovery work.

For larger financial and professional services organizations, some analyses put the upper range of downtime at several million dollars per hour in high-risk scenarios.

Even if your firm sits well below those benchmarks, the direction is clear. You do not need Fortune 500 scale for downtime to be financially painful. A 10 or 20-person CPA firm with a few hours of outage in March can easily burn through five figures in lost billable hours and overtime, which is uncomfortably close to a full year of premium private cloud and managed IT for many practices.

Compliance, Reputation, and Staff Impact

The second layer is harder to quantify but just as real.

1. Compliance and Regulatory Exposure
   
   • If an outage interrupts e-filing close to a deadline, you risk late filings and penalty conversations.
   • If the outage is tied to a security incident, you now have incident response, possible breach notification obligations, and questions about whether you have truly followed IRS Publication 4557, the FTC Safeguards Rule, and your own WISP.
     
2. Client Trust and Perception
   
   • Clients do not separate “IT problems” from “firm reliability.”
   • Repeated outages during peak periods make clients wonder whether their returns and financials are safe with you.
     
3. Staff Burnout and Retention
   
   • Every outage in the busy season typically turns into a late night or weekend somewhere else.
   • That cycle of stop work, rush work, and apologising to clients is a major contributor to burnout and turnover, particularly when staff already work long hours.

A 2024 study of SMEs commissioned by Samsung found that smaller businesses lose an average of 98 hours per year, roughly 12 working days, because of unreliable technology, leading to missed deadlines, lost opportunities, and significant stress among owners and staff.

Accounting firms are more deadline-sensitive than the average SME, so the same 98 hours has a disproportionate impact on margins, morale, and client satisfaction.

A Simple Cost of Downtime Formula for CPA Firms

You do not need a complicated model to get a useful estimate. A straightforward formula is enough to make the risk visible.

Start with this table and plug in your numbers:

Step	Example input	How to calculate
A. Number of staff affected	12 people	Count anyone blocked from doing billable work
B. Blended hourly billable rate	160 dollars per hour	Use a conservative firm-wide average
C. Hours of outage	3 hours	Include slow recovery period if work is still blocked
D. Direct lost revenue	A × B × C	12 × 160 × 3 = 5,760 dollars
E. Overtime factor (catch-up work)	25% of Step D	0.25 × 5,760 = 1,440 dollars
F. IT recovery and incident response	1,000 dollars	Vendor time, diagnostics, any recovery labour
G. Estimated total hard cost		D + E + F = 8,200 dollars

You can be conservative on the assumptions and the total still lands in the thousands for a single outage.

Now imagine that instead of three hours in August, those three hours happen on March 10 or April 14. The same cost hits at the most sensitive point in your year, where late nights, penalties, and client frustration are already more likely.

First Practical Step: Quantify Your Own Exposure

At this point in the article, you have enough context to ask one hard question: “What did downtime actually cost us over the last two years?”

For most firms, the quickest way to answer that is to sit down with:

• A list of the last three to five outages or serious slowdowns
• Basic numbers on staff affected, hourly rates, and duration
• Someone who understands how those incidents affected deadlines and client conversations

If you want outside help to make those numbers more precise, this is exactly the kind of exercise Verito runs as part of a no obligation uptime and risk review for CPA firms. The output is not a generic ROI slide. It is a concrete, busy season-focused view of how much downtime is already costing you and how that compares to a private cloud plus managed IT setup that is engineered around near continuous availability for tax and accounting workloads.

What it Takes Technically to Get Close to 100% Uptime

Near 100 percent uptime is not a matter of “good IT support” or a faster server. For a CPA firm, it is the result of specific architectural choices that remove single points of failure and a support model that watches your environment constantly instead of reacting when things break.

A useful way to think about it is: if your current setup still depends on one office, one server, and one person “who knows the system,” you are a long way from “always on”.

Step 1: Move Off Single On-site Servers and Unmanaged Office Networks

Many firms are still built around one or two aging on-premise servers in a closet, maybe with a battery backup and nightly backups to an external drive or a basic cloud service. That model has hard limits:

On-premise Ad-hoc Setup	Impact on Uptime for CPAs
Single physical server for tax and accounting	If it fails, your entire firm is down
Local power and internet dependency	Office outage means firm outage
Manual or inconsistent patching	Higher risk of crashes and security incidents
Backups not regularly tested	Uncertain recovery time or data loss after an incident
Mixed responsibilities across vendors and staff	Delays and finger-pointing when you need fast recovery

This is not just about convenience. An on-premise model makes it very hard to reach “five nines” availability on the systems that matter.

Step 2: Use Dedicated Private Cloud Hosting for Accounting Software

To get closer to 100 percent uptime, core tax and accounting applications need to live on infrastructure that is built to stay up even when individual components fail. That typically means:

• Hosting in hardened data centers with constant power, cooling, and networking
• Virtualized servers with automatic failover if hardware fails
• Storage that is replicated and monitored
• Security layers that are designed around financial and tax data

There is also an important difference between shared “multi-tenant” environments and dedicated private cloud hosting for accounting firms.

Hosting model	How it works	Why it matters for uptime and risk
Generic shared hosting	Many firms share the same server resources and OS	Noisy neighbors and higher blast radius for failures
Commodity Public Cloud VMs	You manage OS, patches, and apps on public cloud	Uptime depends on your own skills and processes
Dedicated CPA Private Cloud (VeritSpace)	Each firm runs on its own private servers, fully managed	Isolation, predictable performance, and engineered uptime

A platform like VeritSpace is built as a SOC 2 Type II private cloud specifically for tax and accounting firms, with a 100 percent uptime SLA on the hosting side. The combination of dedicated resources, financial data security controls, and managed patching is what allows providers to deliver a “server uptime guarantee” that means something during tax season.

Step 3: Build Redundancy and High Availability Around Core Systems

Even in a private cloud, high uptime does not happen by accident. It depends on deliberate redundancy:

• Multiple data centers, so a localized issue does not take you down
• Redundant power and internet carriers in those facilities
• Clustering and failover for virtual machines and storage
• Load balancing for remote desktop or application access
• Architected maintenance windows that avoid busy season disruption

In practice, what you want to see from an accounting cloud hosting provider is not a single diagram with “high availability” written on it, but a clear explanation of:

• How they handle a host failure in the middle of March
• How they test failover between components
• How often they run disaster recovery exercises against real client environments

If the answers are vague or focus only on backup, you are not looking at a genuine high availability design.

Step 4: 24/7 Monitoring, Patch Management, and Managed IT

Hosting alone solves only part of the uptime problem. If your endpoints, networks, and authentication stack are fragile, you can still experience frequent downtime even when your cloud platform is rock solid.

This is where round-the-clock monitoring and managed IT services for accounting firms come in:

Capability	Role in uptime for CPA firms
24/7 monitoring	Catches issues before they become full outages
Proactive patch management	Reduces crashes and security incidents from unpatched systems
Managed endpoint protection	Limits malware and ransomware that can take systems offline
Centralized identity and MFA	Prevents lockouts and security events that disrupt access
Standardized device builds	Makes troubleshooting and recovery faster

Services like Verito’s VeritGuard extend the high availability logic from the data center into your day-to-day IT environment. Instead of waiting for someone to notice that Remote Desktop is slow or that a server is running out of disk space, monitoring tools flag and resolve issues in the background.

For firms that want a single point of accountability, bundling private cloud and managed IT into one relationship through an offering like VeritComplete is often the cleanest option. One partner is on the hook for uptime SLA compliance, endpoint health, patching, and front-line support, which removes the gaps that usually show up in the middle of busy season.

Step 5: Ransomware-resistant Backups and Tested Disaster Recovery

Backups are often treated as a checkbox for compliance. From an uptime perspective, the details matter:

• Are backups stored offsite and logically separated from production systems
• Are there immutable or versioned backups that cannot be encrypted by ransomware
• How frequently are backups taken and how long are they retained
• When was the last time a full environment restore was tested, not just a file restore

A healthy setup for CPA firms usually includes:

Backup and DR feature	Target
Backup frequency	At least daily for full systems, more often for key data
Backup storage	Offsite, encrypted, with role-based access
Immutability or versioning	Snapshots that cannot be modified by malware
Regular restore testing	Scheduled full restore tests, with documented RTO and RPO
Documented DR plan	Clear steps, contacts, and communication process

Here is where your CPA firm backup and compliance checklist content should be internally linked. Backups and recovery times are now a direct input to uptime. If you can restore a full environment in hours instead of days, even a serious incident does not have to destroy a week of productivity.

Step 6: Security and Compliance That Protect Uptime, Not Just Audits

Security and uptime are often managed by different people, but for a CPA firm they are deeply connected. Many major outages now trace back to security incidents: ransomware, unauthorized access, or misconfigurations during rushed changes.

Aligning with frameworks like SOC 2 Type II, FTC Safeguards, and IRS Publication 4557 has operational benefits:

• Documented change management reduces outages from risky updates
• Standardized configurations lower the chance of one misconfigured system affecting everyone
• Strong identity and access controls make it harder for attackers to take systems down
• Centralized logging and monitoring make it faster to diagnose and resolve incidents

Put differently: the same investments you make to prove you are safeguarding taxpayer data should also be making your environment more stable. If your security projects are not improving uptime, you are either focusing on the wrong controls or not implementing them in a way that translates into day-to-day reliability.

Questions to Ask Any Provider Who Promises “100% Uptime”

Once you understand what uptime really means, the next step is to pressure test providers who claim to deliver it. Most marketing pages sound the same. The difference shows up when you ask clear, specific questions and insist on concrete answers.

You can treat the following as a checklist for RFPs and vendor meetings.

Key Questions and What You Are Looking For

Question you should ask	What a strong answer looks like
1. What is your formal uptime SLA, and how is it measured?	A specific number (99.9, 99.99, or 99.999 percent) and a clear definition
2. How much downtime does that SLA allow per year?	Hours or minutes, not just percentages
3. Can you share your actual uptime history for the last 3 to 5 years?	Documented figures, ideally broken out by year and busy season periods
4. How do you handle planned maintenance during tax season?	Limited windows, strong change control, busy season restrictions
5. Are we on dedicated private servers or in a shared environment?	Clear explanation that your firm has isolated resources
6. How often do you test backups and full environment restore?	Regular, scheduled tests with target recovery times
7. What are your response and resolution time targets during outages?	Published SLAs for response and escalation, not vague “as fast as we can”
8. How is your platform aligned with SOC 2, FTC Safeguards, and IRS Publication 4557?	Named reports, attestations, and control mappings
9. Who is responsible for endpoints, MFA, and local networks?	Either the provider takes this on, or they clearly define the split
10. What happens financially if you miss your uptime SLA?	Credits or other remedies written into the contract

You can walk through each of these in a live conversation and make notes. Providers who really operate at high availability for CPA firms should be able to answer without hesitation and back up claims with documentation.

Additional Probing Questions for CPA-specific Workloads

On top of the generic uptime questions, accounting firms can benefit from asking questions that relate to their calendar and software stack:

1. How many CPA and tax firms do you host today, and at what scale?
   
   • Listen for experience hosting the major tax, accounting, and engagement platforms you actually use.
     
2. How do you prioritise incidents that occur during January to April?
   
   • Look for explicit busy season triage rules and staffing plans.
     
3. What is your change freeze or change control policy during peak season?
   
   • High reliability providers usually limit risky changes in the months that matter most to you.
     
4. How do you support firms during filing deadline weeks?
   
   • Ask about extended support hours, additional staffing, and real examples from previous years.
     
5. What visibility do we get into your uptime and incident history?
   
   • A provider that believes in its availability record should be comfortable sharing dashboards or regular reports.

How to Compare Providers Using These Questions

After you interview two or three providers, it helps to put answers in a simple comparison table. For example:

Criterion	Provider A	Provider B	Provider C
Formal uptime SLA	99.9 percent	99.999 percent	99.99 percent
Documented uptime last 3 years	Not provided	Provided, 100 percent hosting side	Provided, small gaps in 2 years
Hosting model	Shared multi-tenant	Dedicated private cloud	Mixed
Busy season change freeze	None	Defined policy, limited changes	Informal
Backup and restore test frequency	“As needed”	Scheduled, quarterly full tests	Annual
Managed IT and endpoint coverage offered	No	Yes, integrated	Partial

This does not need to be complicated. Even a basic side-by-side view will usually show which providers have thought deeply about uptime for CPA firms and which are repackaging generic SMB hosting.

Why Verito is Built for “Always On” CPA Firms

By this point, it should be clear that near 100 percent uptime for CPA firms requires more than generic cloud hosting and ad-hoc IT help. Verito was built specifically to fill that gap for tax and accounting practices that have zero tolerance for outages in busy season.

Specialized for Tax and Accounting From the Ground-up

Verito’s entire stack is built around how CPA and tax firms actually work:

• Supports the core applications you already use, including QuickBooks Desktop, Sage 50, Lacerte, Drake Tax, CCH Axcess, UltraTax and other common tax and accounting platforms.
• Environments and performance are tuned for multi-user accounting databases and large tax software files, not generic office productivity workloads.
• The focus is on firms with roughly 1 to 50 staff that live and die by deadline-driven work and cannot afford busy season instability.

For uptime, specialization matters. A provider that hosts everything from marketing sites to file servers has different priorities than one whose customer base is dominated by firms that cannot miss March and April deadlines.

SOC 2 Type II Infrastructure and Dedicated Private Servers

Verito’s platform is designed as a security-first private cloud:

Element	What Verito provides	Why that supports uptime for CPAs
Compliance framework	SOC 2 Type II certified infrastructure	Independent validation of controls around availability and security
Isolation of environments	Completely isolated customer environments on dedicated private servers	No “noisy neighbor” impact from other tenants
Encryption and access controls	Enterprise grade encryption, MFA, and access management by default	Reduces risk of incidents that could take systems offline
Regulatory alignment	Stack designed around FTC Safeguards Rule and IRS Publication 4557	Security controls that also support operational stability

The same design decisions that help with FTC Safeguards, IRS Publication 4557 and WISP obligations also remove single points of failure and create predictability in how the environment behaves.

VeritSpace and The “Five Nines” Uptime SLA

VeritSpace is Verito’s dedicated private cloud hosting service for tax and accounting software:

• VeritSpace offers a 100 percent uptime SLA on the hosting side, which translates to less than six minutes of allowed downtime per year.
  
• On top of that SLA, Verito has delivered a 100 percent uptime track record on core hosting since 2016 on the provider side.

For a CPA firm, that combination matters more than a marketing phrase:

Aspect	What it means in practice for your firm
“Five nines” uptime SLA	Provider side downtime is contractually constrained to minutes per year
100 percent hosting record	The private cloud has, in practice, stayed up through many busy seasons
Dedicated private servers	Your workloads are insulated from other firms and noisy neighbors

You still need your own internet and devices to cooperate, but the core platform that runs your tax and accounting systems is engineered and operated as an “always on” service.

VeritGuard and VeritComplete as the Operational Layer

High availability in the data center is only half the story. Verito adds a managed IT layer that extends that reliability all the way to your staff:

• VeritGuard provides 24/7 managed IT for CPA firms, including endpoint management, patching, monitoring and security operations.
• VeritComplete combines VeritSpace hosting with VeritGuard into an all-in-one hosting and IT bundle for accounting firms that want a single accountable partner.

Internally, Verito underpins this with the VeritCertified program:

• Engineers go through structured training and certification before working on client environments.
• Support metrics include sub one-minute average response times, 92 percent first-touch resolution and a 95 NPS, according to the internal guidelines.

For a CPA firm, those numbers translate directly into uptime. When something does go wrong, it is far more likely to be fixed on the first call without escalation or long delays.

Example: From Recurring Outages to Stable Busy Seasons

Consider a mid-sized firm that started with:

• Two on-premise servers handling tax, accounting and file storage
• A local IT consultant on call but not monitoring systems
• Regular slowdowns and two or three significant outages each busy season, often tied to hardware issues or unplanned updates

After moving core workloads to VeritSpace and layering VeritGuard managed IT on top, their environment looked more like this:

Before Verito	After Verito
Local servers in one office	SOC 2 Type II private cloud with dedicated servers
No real uptime SLA	99.999 percent uptime SLA on hosting
Reactive, ticket-based IT support	24/7 monitoring with proactive remediation
Multiple outages each busy season	No provider-side outages in busy season
Staff losing hours waiting on systems	Staff treating access as a given and focusing on work

The firm did not suddenly become immune to every problem. They still had an occasional ISP issue or local device failure.

What changed was that the risk of a three or four hour busy season outage caused by server failure or platform instability effectively disappeared. Leadership stopped wondering if the servers would make it through March and started focusing on staffing and client work instead.

Stop Treating Downtime as Just an IT Problem

For most CPA firms, “uptime” still shows up as a technical line item in proposals from hosting and IT vendors. In reality, it should sit on the same level as realization, write-offs, and client retention on your partner agenda.

When tax software, accounting platforms, document management, and email are down, you are not “having an IT issue.” You are unable to generate revenue, meet regulatory deadlines, or maintain the client experience your reputation depends on. In busy season, a single multi-hour outage can erase the margin on dozens of engagements and undo months of work to improve workflow and staffing.

The good news is that near 100 percent uptime is not mysterious. You now know what it actually involves:

• Recognizing that “100 percent uptime” is a design objective plus a track record, not a magic guarantee.
• Moving core workloads to a SOC 2 private cloud designed for CPA firms, not generic shared hosting.
• Pairing that infrastructure with 24/7 managed IT, security, and monitoring so there are no blind spots between the data center and your staff.
• Documenting who owns what in a shared responsibility model, so there are no surprises when something does go wrong.

Once you treat uptime as a financial and risk decision rather than a commodity IT purchase, the logic changes. Investing in private cloud and managed IT that consistently delivers “five nines” availability on the hosting side is not an optional upgrade; it is a way of buying back billable hours, protecting deadlines, and reducing burnout.

If your firm is serious about eliminating “server panic” from the busy season, the next logical step is to replace assumptions with data. A focused security and uptime assessment with Verito can show you, in concrete terms, how your current environment stacks up against a five nines, SOC 2 private cloud built for tax and accounting work, where the biggest risks sit, and what it would take to close them before your next peak season.

From there, you can decide whether continuing to live with downtime is really cheaper than designing it out of your firm.

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TL;DR:

• 100 percent uptime is a design goal, not a literal guarantee. Even the strongest uptime SLAs for accounting firms are written as 99.9, 99.99, or 99.999 percent. The real question is how much downtime those numbers allow, and when it is likely to hit your firm.
• The difference between “three nines” and “five nines” is huge in busy season.
  
  • 99.9 percent uptime can still mean hours of downtime per year.
  • 99.999 percent uptime cuts that to only a few minutes.
    On paper that is a small gap. In March it can mean the difference between a short blip and an entire morning of staff sitting idle.
    
• For CPA firms, timing matters more than the annual total. A two or three hour outage in August is frustrating. The same outage on March 10 or April 14 can disrupt dozens of returns, trigger overtime, and put filing deadlines at risk. Uptime for CPA firms has to be measured in terms of peak season availability, not just annual percentages.
  
• Downtime is not just an IT issue. It hits billable hours, client experience, and compliance. A few hours of outage across a 10 or 20 person firm can translate into thousands of dollars in lost productivity, rushed work, and higher stress during tax season.
  
• True “near 100 percent uptime” requires specific architecture. You cannot get there with a single on premise server and ad hoc IT support. In practice, it requires: dedicated private cloud hosting for your tax and accounting software, redundant infrastructure, 24/7 monitoring, tested backups, and a security stack aligned with FTC Safeguards and IRS Publication 4557.
  
• Your provider cannot control everything. A strong uptime SLA for accounting firms usually covers the provider side: data centers, servers, storage, and core hosting. Your firm still controls internet connectivity in each office, device health, staff behavior, and internal policies. Closing uptime gaps means understanding where your responsibility starts and ends.
  
• Specialized CPA cloud providers get you closest to “always on”. A SOC 2 Type II private cloud built specifically for tax and accounting, such as Verito’s VeritSpace platform paired with managed IT services like VeritGuard or VeritComplete, is designed to deliver five nines level uptime on the hosting side, while also addressing security, compliance, and support in one place.

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