Operational Excellence: The Three Pillars of AI-Driven Outage Prevention

Operational Excellence: The Three Pillars of AI-Driven Outage Prevention

Stabilise your monitoring, standardise triage and optimise with AI — for truly resilient IT.

When your systems go down, work stops across your organisation. It’s not just your technology that’s affected, but your people’s ability to act, your customers’ ability to access services, and ultimately, your organisation’s ability to deliver value.

The financial reality is stark, according to this Forbes article, system downtime costs organisations around £7,100 per minute. That’s over £426,000 per hour of lost productivity, missed opportunities, and frustrated customers. Within higher-risk organisations, such as finance and healthcare, the article suggests, this figure can soar to £4 million per hour.

But the true cost extends beyond these numbers. When systems fail repeatedly, people lose trust—employees can’t do their jobs effectively, and customers look elsewhere for more reliable alternatives. Your reputation takes a hit that won’t be captured by the numbers on your spreadsheets.

I talk to many IT leaders whose teams find themselves caught in a cycle of constant firefighting – drowning in alerts from too many monitoring tools, struggling to identify the root cause of problems, and lacking the time to implement real solutions. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

Why Are Outages Still Happening?

Despite all our investments in better technology, organisations still experience ongoing downtime.

Why does this keep happening?

• Too many tools: Most organisations have multiple monitoring systems that don’t talk to each other, creating blind spots.

• Information overload: Many IT teams find they’re receiving almost constant alerts, making it impossible to separate critical issues from background noise.

• Reactive mindset: When your team are constantly putting out fires, there’s no time for them to work on preventing the next one.

• Legacy systems under pressure: The older technology that underpins many organisations often struggles to handle today’s data volumes and expectations.

• Human factors: Even the best teams make mistakes when under constant pressure.

For many IT leaders, it’s not a question of if their systems will fail, but when – and how badly.

A Better Approach: The Three Pillars of AI-Driven Outage Prevention

Rather than another quick fix or technology purchase, lasting improvement requires a structured approach. We’ve identified three essential pillars that together create truly resilient IT operations:

Pillar 1: Stabilise — Simplify Your Monitoring

The journey begins with creating clarity from chaos.

Monitoring environments grow organically. Over the years, with each new system or application requiring its own monitoring tools, you find you’ve got multiple systems generating alerts, using different metrics, and creating a fragmented view of your infrastructure. 

The result is: 

• Conflicting information about what’s really happening

• Wasted time switching between different tools

• Missed connections between related issues

• Higher costs for maintaining multiple systems

• Knowledge scattered across different specialists

The Solution

Research shows most organisations can consolidate their monitoring tools at a 10:1 ratio without losing visibility. This simplification creates a single, reliable view of your infrastructure, eliminates contradictory information, makes workflows smoother for your team, enables knowledge sharing more effectively, and reduces licensing and support costs.

Pillar 2: Standardise — Find Problems Faster

Once you have clearer visibility, the next step is responding more effectively when issues arise.

When things go wrong, diagnosis often depends on who’s handling the incident, with different team members using different approaches, relying on different information, and having varying levels of experience.

This inconsistency means:

• Problems can take much longer to solve than necessary

• Issues can be solved differently each time they occur

• Knowledge isn’t shared, but stays locked with specific experts

• New team members find it a struggle to get up to speed

• Those in the business affected by these issues experience unpredictable response times

The Solution

Organisations that implement a consistent, structured approach to their incident resolution report a 50% increase in productivity for their IT teams. Standardisation and automation bring faster identification of problems, consistent quality regardless of who responds, better knowledge sharing across the team with increased visibility, less reliance on specific individuals and clear steps that everyone can follow.

Pillar 3: Optimise — Prevent Problems Before They Happen

The final pillar allows organisations to move from reaction to prevention through intelligent automation — the foundation of any effective AI-driven outage prevention strategy.

Even with better tools and processes, human teams face fundamental limitations:

• We can’t process the sheer volume of data modern systems generate

• We’re slower to spot subtle patterns that indicate emerging problems

• We apply best practices inconsistently

• We can’t continuously check everything all the time

• We need sleep (unlike our systems)

The Solution

Organisations using AI-powered operations report a 66% reduction in alert noise and dramatically improved prevention capabilities. This approach brings with it early warnings before users notice problems, automatic fixes for routine issues, continuous fine-tuning of system performance, less alert fatigue for your team, and in turn a genuine shift from constantly reacting to problems to thoughtfully improving systems.

Real Results: What Difference Does It Make?

When organisations establish these three pillars working together, tangible improvements are made.

We see:

• Less firefighting, more innovation: With teams spending time improving services, not just maintaining them.

• Higher reliability: Systems that just work, creating confidence across the organisation.

• Happier teams: Your IT professionals are able to focus on meaningful work rather than repetitive tasks, and employees across the organisation are less frustrated by tech problems.

• Better business reputation: With services that customers and employees can depend on.

• Lower costs: Fewer outages, more efficient operations, and better use of technology investments, which is much better for your bottom line.

The Forbes article we mentioned earlier examines organisations pursuing the goal of “five-nines” availability (99.999% uptime, allowing just 5.26 minutes of downtime per year). These three pillars provide a strong foundation for approaching this ambitious standard.

This approach can transform your IT from a potential vulnerability into a genuine business advantage. By strengthening your systems to reliably support your people and customers, you create the foundation for true digital innovation. And when downtime costs £7,100 per minute, resilience isn’t just an IT priority—it’s a business imperative.