Uptime explained: achieving enterprise reliability

Quick summary

Uptime represents the time a digital system remains available to users. At 99.98%, downtime equals just 105 minutes per year. Achieving that level demands resilient design, proactive monitoring, automation, and a reliability-focused culture that treats availability as a shared responsibility.

Introduction

Our platform, Wirtek IoT Suite (formerly Wappsto), consistently operates at 99.98% uptime, a figure that may seem abstract until one realises it translates to just under two hours of downtime across an entire year. In today’s interconnected world, uptime is far more than a technical metric. It is the invisible backbone of digital trust, customer satisfaction, and operational continuity.

Whether a service manages industrial IoT data, supports an energy grid, or powers financial transactions, uptime determines reliability. As systems grow more distributed and interdependent, even minor outages can ripple across business ecosystems, affecting compliance, revenue, and reputation.

What uptime actually measures

Uptime expresses the percentage of time a system is operational and accessible over a defined period, typically a year. Its counterpart, downtime, reflects when users cannot access core services. Together, they form the foundation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs), contractual commitments that define acceptable availability.

In numerical terms, uptime is often misunderstood. For instance:

• 99% uptime allows about 3.65 days of downtime per year.

• 99.9% uptime equals roughly 8 hours 45 minutes.

• 99.98% uptime reduces downtime to just 1 hour 45 minutes.

This is why enterprise-grade systems aim for “four nines” (99.99%) or better. The closer a system gets to 100%, the more effort and cost are required to sustain that availability.

Takeaway: Uptime is a quantifiable reflection of reliability, and a direct proxy for customer trust.

Why uptime matters

Every minute of downtime carries a cost. Lost transactions, disrupted workflows, and diminished confidence are immediate outcomes. In sectors such as energy, telecommunications, and finance, service continuity also intersects with public safety and regulatory obligations.

According to CloudSecureTech (2025), the average cost of IT downtime now exceeds $5,600 per minute for large enterprises. In Europe, frameworks like the NIS2 Directive require service providers to maintain operational resilience and continuity, making uptime a compliance as well as a business priority.

High uptime isn’t only about meeting user expectations, it ensures:

• Business continuity: Core services remain available, preventing costly interruptions.

• Regulatory compliance: Availability targets align with standards such as ISO 27001 and NIS2.

• Customer confidence: Predictable service builds long-term trust.

• Operational efficiency: Teams spend less time on firefighting and more on innovation.

Takeaway: Maintaining uptime safeguards both revenue and reputation, two of the most valuable business assets.

Architectural foundations of uptime

Sustaining 99.98% availability starts at the architectural level. Systems must be built to tolerate failure rather than simply avoid it. That mindset underpins resilient design.

Resilient systems rely on three architectural principles:

• Redundancy: Critical components are duplicated across regions or availability zones so that one failure does not cascade into system-wide downtime.

• Load balancing: Traffic is distributed intelligently to prevent overload and ensure performance consistency.

• Failover mechanisms: When a node or service fails, automated rerouting maintains service continuity without manual intervention.

According to Gartner (2025), enterprise investment in distributed and multi-region cloud design continues to grow as reliability becomes a key differentiator in platform selection. The cost of redundancy is often outweighed by the value of uninterrupted operation, especially in mission-critical platforms that cannot afford even short outages.

Takeaway: Reliability begins in design, availability must be engineered, not assumed.

Observability and incident response

Once a platform is live, knowing what is happening inside complex distributed systems becomes essential. Observability extends traditional monitoring by focusing on understanding why issues occur, not just when.

Effective observability combines:

• Metrics for system performance (latency, throughput, error rates).

• Logs for detailed event histories that help trace root causes.

• Traces for visualising data flows across microservices or APIs.

Together, these allow teams to detect anomalies early and reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR), the average duration between incident detection and resolution.

Mature organisations complement monitoring with robust incident response protocols, including defined escalation paths, real-time collaboration tools, and post-incident reviews. Such practices, known as blameless post-mortems, turn downtime into a learning opportunity rather than a failure.

Takeaway: Observability shortens downtime by transforming data into actionable insights.

Automation and continuous testing

Human error remains one of the leading causes of system outages. Automating routine tasks and infrastructure responses is therefore central to maintaining uptime.

Automation contributes to reliability through:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Ensuring environments are reproducible and version-controlled.

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Delivering updates safely without service interruption.

• Automated failover and healing: Restarting or rerouting services instantly when faults occur.

Continuous testing adds a complementary safety layer. Techniques such as chaos engineering, deliberately introducing failures to validate recovery processes, help teams prepare for real incidents. The Erwood Group (2025) highlights that enterprises with mature automation experience 40-50% less downtime compared to manual infrastructure management.

Takeaway: Automation transforms reliability from reactive maintenance into proactive resilience.

Security and compliance as uptime enablers

Outages are not always technical failures; they are often side effects of security events or misconfigurations. A single expired certificate or unpatched vulnerability can disrupt availability.

To sustain uptime, platforms must integrate security-by-design and compliance standards that reinforce resilience. Frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, and the EU’s NIS2 Directive require demonstrable continuity planning and incident response capabilities.

Typical measures include:

• Regular vulnerability scanning and timely patching cycles.

• Access control and segmentation to isolate potential breaches.

• Disaster recovery testing aligned with regulatory requirements.

These controls reduce both the probability and impact of security-related downtime. In regulated markets like the EU energy sector, compliance is therefore not separate from uptime, it is an operational requirement.

Takeaway: Security and availability are inseparable pillars of system resilience.

Building a culture of reliability

Technology alone cannot guarantee uptime. Sustainable reliability emerges when teams share ownership and view availability as a collective responsibility.

The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) model exemplifies this mindset, blending software engineering and operations. SRE teams manage error budgets, the acceptable margin of failure, to balance innovation speed with stability.

A culture of reliability is built through:

• Transparency: Publishing uptime metrics and incident summaries.

• Learning: Conducting blameless post-mortems and sharing lessons.

• Empowerment: Giving engineers authority to act on reliability risks.

These practices cultivate trust both internally and externally. When everyone in a team understands how their work affects uptime, reliability becomes part of the organisation’s DNA rather than a separate function.

Takeaway: Reliability culture turns processes into consistent performance.

The cost and value of uptime

Reaching 99.98% uptime involves significant investment, redundant infrastructure, monitoring platforms, skilled personnel, yet the long-term value outweighs these costs. Downtime, after all, is far more expensive than prevention.

The Cockroach Labs “State of Resilience 2025” report found that high-availability platforms reduce financial downtime losses by over 60% compared to legacy architectures. When viewed against figures showing that global downtime costs can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, resilience engineering becomes not a cost centre but a strategic enabler of continuity and trust.

Takeaway: The cost of reliability is predictable; the cost of downtime is not.

Conclusion

Uptime is the simplest yet most powerful indicator of digital reliability. Achieving 99.98% availability requires more than advanced infrastructure, it demands foresight, automation, observability, and a company culture dedicated to continuous improvement.

As digital ecosystems expand, uptime will remain a defining measure of trust. Systems that sustain near-continuous availability do more than perform; they earn confidence, ensure compliance, and keep critical industries running smoothly.

FAQ

What does 99.98% uptime mean in practical terms?
It means a system is unavailable for no more than about 105 minutes in a full year, a benchmark associated with enterprise-grade reliability.

Why is perfect (100%) uptime impossible?
Because maintenance, updates, and unpredictable network events always require minimal downtime. The goal is to minimise disruption, not eliminate it entirely.

How is uptime verified?
Independent monitoring tools measure system response and availability across regions. These metrics are often audited against SLAs or internal performance dashboards.

What’s the difference between uptime and reliability?
Uptime measures availability over time, while reliability assesses consistency of performance and recovery behaviour. Both are required for service excellence.

Sources

• • The state of operational resilience 2025: Confronting outages, downtime, and enterprise readiness – Cockroach Labs – https://www.cockroachlabs.com/guides/the-state-of-resilience-2025/ cockroachlabs.com

  • The true costs of downtime in 2025 – Erwood Group – https://www.erwoodgroup.com/blog/the-true-costs-of-downtime-in-2025-a-deep-dive-by-business-size-and-industry/ Erwood Group

  • The cost of IT downtime in 2025 – CloudSecureTech – https://www.cloudsecuretech.com/cost-of-it-downtime-in-2025/ CloudSecureTech

  • Gartner forecasts worldwide public-cloud spending to hit $723 billion in 2025 – Gartner press release – https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-11-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-total-723-billion-dollars-in-2025 Gartner