Internet outages cost companies millions. Is a position in the C suite the answer?

From cloud vendors to data centers, modern businesses rely on a multitude of Internet-connected applications and services to deliver what their customers expect. When any one of those links in the chain breaks, it can translate directly into lost revenue—a lot of it.

According to an upcoming report from web performance monitoring platform Catchpoint, 43% of businesses surveyed across the finance, e-commerce, cloud and healthcare sectors estimated they lost “more than $1 million due to outages or Internet degradations in the month prior to the Survey.”

In an early look at Catchpoint’s first Internet Resilience Report, shared with Tech Brew, Catchpoint presents a solution: plan for and guard against outages from the top down.

Just as “there are financial consequences to security breaches, there are financial consequences — and brand and reputational consequences — to resilience and not having proper resilience,” Catchpoint CEO and co-founder Mehdi Daoudi told Tech Brew in an interview. “People should take it as seriously as safety.”

As the report notes, Fortune 2000 companies are increasingly adding a chief reliability officer or chief sustainability officer to their C-suites. Daoudi said these job titles should become even more common, especially as many businesses outsource technology functions to large service providers that can have a domino effect when they go down.

For example, Catchpoint discovered and documented a widespread Adobe Experience Cloud outage late last year that lasted for 18 hours. Service interruptions can also stem from a breakdown in physical infrastructure, such as the submarine cable outages that have recently affected East Africa, he noted.

“That’s why I think it’s important to have a chief sustainability officer, because that person would essentially drive the planning,” he said. “Where are our single points of failure? And how do we deal with this?”

Learning from mistakes

No room in the budget for a new executive? No problem. Daoudi suggested that any company can change its culture by documenting and studying errors in the product distribution chain.

“If you’re not going to go and hire a chief sustainability officer, it’s important that companies embrace resilience and reliability. How? “Encouraging learning from failure, not shooting,” he said. “What did we learn from this interruption? What can we do to strengthen our positions going forward?”

He suggested conducting preventive exercises to “punch the system and break it and see not only what’s broken, but how do people react?”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that companies should continue to work with vendors who consistently hinder their service delivery or show that they’re not a reliable link in the chain, he said.

“I think we’re all allowed to make a mistake, I think it’s extremely important to make sure you can learn from it,” Daoudi said. “If the vendor doesn’t learn from it, or they have a reputation for not caring about it, then you shouldn’t do business with them.”

Catchpoint’s inaugural Internet Resilience Report will be released on Tuesday morning.