This article is the extended version of my LinkedIn post.
Modern digital enterprises live under a paradox: customers expect zero downtime, yet infrastructure grows increasingly complex. IT Infrastructure Operations (InfraOps) teams carry the weight of this paradox every day.
The headlines are familiar—major outages, service degradations, prolonged recovery times. What’s less visible is the root cause: it’s rarely hardware. According to Gartner, 80% of downtime comes from misconfigurations, poor change control, or gaps in design. Uptime Institute adds that only 20% of outages are caused by hardware; the rest trace back to software, process, or organizational shortcomings.
In other words: technology isn’t failing us—our ways of working are.
The Daily Reality of InfraOps
Most InfraOps teams don’t lack commitment. They are highly skilled engineers, often working late nights to put out fires. The problem is structural:
- Human errors amplified by lack of automation. Manual patching, repetitive configuration, or one-off fixes create fragile systems.
- Unresponsive vendors. Support partners can delay resolution, yet InfraOps teams often lack escalation power.
- Architectures that lack resilience. Systems without proper HA, failover, or observability increase both mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recover (MTTR).
- Distributed responsibility, but no shared accountability. When everything is “someone else’s problem,” the Ops team ends up firefighting without authority.
It’s an exhausting cycle: the Ops team fights to stabilize, but without influence on design, funding, or vendor governance, the same issues keep resurfacing.
Where Leadership Backing Matters
This is where leadership comes in—not as distant overseers, but as enablers. Leaders must shift from expecting outcomes to funding and enabling outcomes.
Key areas where leadership makes the difference:
- Clear ownership between application and infrastructure. Gray areas cause finger-pointing. Leaders must enforce RACI clarity.
- Vendor accountability. Escalation paths should be supported at the executive level, not left to engineers chasing support tickets.
- Modern practices adoption. Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automated healing, and observability investments are not luxuries; they are survival tools.
- Alignment on SLOs and MTTR. If leadership doesn’t back realistic service-level objectives, Ops is set up to fail.
A favorite line from Gene Kim comes to mind: “Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.” Leadership must invest in improvement, not just output.
Stories from the Field
I recall a situation where our Ops team flagged repeated slow recoveries from database failovers. Initially dismissed as “just operational noise,” the issue became a recurring incident affecting customer-facing apps. Only when leadership backed funding for HA redesign and observability tooling did recovery times improve—and so did morale.
In another case, a telco’s vendor support delays stretched incidents by hours. When executives directly engaged the vendor at a governance level, escalation times dropped dramatically. Engineers felt heard, and customers felt the difference.
The lesson: Ops doesn’t lack ideas—it often lacks backing.
Closing Reflection
InfraOps teams are often the unsung heroes of enterprise resilience. But heroics alone cannot sustain stability.
Leaders must step up—not just to demand uptime, but to build the conditions where uptime is sustainable. That means investing in automation, fostering collaboration, and driving accountability across partners.
When Ops is empowered to evolve, resilience follows.
So the question I leave for every leader—including myself—is this:
Are we enabling our InfraOps teams to improve daily work, or just expecting them to survive it?
📑 References: Gartner (2021) – Downtime Root Causes; Uptime Institute (2022) – Outage Analysis Report; Gene Kim – The Phoenix Project.
