More and more expectation of availability and reliability

Clearly we see that when compared to the past decade the expectation of availability and reliability is ever increasing. In some sense the culture is becoming uncompromising to sluggishness.
Society expects uninterrupted service from many of the systems that it employs, such as credit card verification networks and integrated manufacturing systems. Embedded software designers are being asked more often to create systems that run reliably to the degree that they're in service 99.999 percent of the time (termed 'five-nines' availability), which is equivalent to less than one second of downtime per day.