Perspective
What downtime actually costs
Reliability and resilience
Reliability gets underfunded for a simple reason. The cost of an outage stays invisible right up until the moment it happens, and prevention has to compete for budget against things that feel more urgent today.
Uptime Institute put numbers on the invisible part. More than half of significant outages cost the business over $100,000, and one in five run past a million, and those figures keep climbing as recovery windows stretch and the penalties and reputational damage pile on. Set that against what prevention usually costs. A clear look at where the single points of failure sit, and a recovery plan that someone has actually tested rather than just written down. In most cases the prevention is a rounding error next to the event it avoids. The reason it still does not get funded is that no one has put the downside in front of the person who approves the budget.
So part of my job, early in any engagement, is to make that number visible before an outage makes it visible for everyone. I would rather hand a CEO a one-page estimate of what a day of downtime actually costs the business in lost revenue and contract penalties than have them learn it from an incident review. Once the number is on the table, the prevention conversation gets a lot shorter.
Further reading · Uptime Institute
Annual Outage Analysis 2025
This is the kind of problem I help companies work through.
If your systems keep going down and you find out from customers first, that is the conversation.
I work as a fractional CIO or CTO for companies that need senior technology leadership without a full-time hire.