Understanding the customer and revenue impact
More than most, I talk about SRE in terms of customer and revenue impact. In a world so heavily dependent upon the services that prop up websites and technology, it’s not difficult to understand that when they go down, we feel the impact in everything, from watching our favorite show to airline flight cancellations, and even something as simple as purchasing gas. Even worse, when customers feel abandoned or under-served, they often look in the marketplace for alternatives, and this tendency increases the longer and more often a system goes down.
Beyond the customer impact, companies often feel financial impacts on their bottom-line during outages. This impact ranges from simple lost sales to more complex erosion of a brand, which can cost advertising dollars to fix and stifle the growth of a company. We also often forget the human element of outages; having been on calls that cost companies thousands of dollars an hour in manpower...
