Why CTOs And CIOs Should Care More About The Cost Of Downtime

In today's digital landscape, downtime in online businesses directly affects financial performance and brand reputation, with companies potentially losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour during outages. High-profile incidents, such as the British Airways outage costing £80 million, highlight the severe impact downtime can have. Despite this, many CTOs and CIOs still consider downtime either inevitable or something that shouldn’t occur, which leads to missed opportunities in proactive management. Emphasizing operations as a priority can save engineering resources for innovation rather than post-incident analysis. Proactive strategies, like Chaos Engineering, involve deliberately inducing failure in systems to identify and fix vulnerabilities before they affect customers, thereby maintaining reliability in increasingly complex digital environments. Additionally, tools like Gremlin's automated reliability platform offer businesses the ability to uncover and address potential risks preemptively, safeguarding customer trust and optimizing operational efficiency.