Downtime isn’t just about systems going offline. It’s about how well your business can adapt and keep moving forward. Whether it’s a minor glitch or a large-scale outage, it affects revenue, productivity, and the trust your customers place in your services. For instance, in July 2024, CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform faced an outage that cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion. Businesses that had proactive strategies recovered faster, minimizing the damage.

As an SRE, you constantly juggle proactive tasks to improve reliability and scalability with reactive firefighting when issues arise—often leaving little time to address the root causes. This is not unlike the firefighters of Ancient Rome, the Vigiles, who were tasked with not only responding to fires but also preventing them. Established in 6 AD under Emperor Augustus, the Vigiles patrolled the streets of Rome, looking for potential fire hazards.