Your business can survive a bad quarter. It cannot survive losing customer trust week after week because systems keep going down.
Uptime is not an IT hobby. It is a promise to customers, lenders, and your board about how reliable your company really is. When that promise breaks, you pay in lost revenue, churn, and credibility.
This is where clear, simple uptime targets come in. Set the right targets, in the right way, and you turn vague complaints about “outages” into a clear contract between you and your tech team. You get control, not noise.
Why Uptime Targets Are A CEO Issue, Not Just An IT Metric
Every outage has a story behind it. A failed payment during a campaign. A sales demo that freezes. A warehouse that cannot ship for two hours.
Your team talks about root causes. Your board talks about risk.
Uptime targets let you connect those two worlds. They turn “IT is unreliable” into a measurable, managed topic that sits next to revenue, margin, and cash on your agenda.
For a mid-market company, downtime is not abstract. A single 3-hour outage on a busy day can:
- Block hundreds of orders
- Create a spike in support tickets
- Trigger questions from partners or auditors
Do that a few times a year and people start to wonder if your company is safe to bet on.
When you define clear uptime targets by system, you can:
- Decide where near-perfect reliability is non‑negotiable
- Accept sensible risk where the business can tolerate it
- Hold vendors and internal teams to numbers, not feelings
The point is not perfection. The point is informed trade-offs you can explain in a board deck.
Turn Uptime Targets Into Plain Business Numbers
Many CEOs hear “we need five nines” and quietly wonder what that means. Your tech team often speaks in nines. You need it in hours and minutes.
Here is a simple view of common uptime targets:
| Uptime target | Max yearly downtime | Customer experience summary |
|---|---|---|
| 99.0% | ~3.7 days | Feels unreliable, frequent visible breaks |
| 99.9% | ~8.8 hours | Occasional outages, annoying but survivable |
| 99.99% | ~52 minutes | Rare issues, usually short and contained |
Once you see it in this format, the picture changes. Moving from 99.0% to 99.9% uptime is the difference between several days lost and a workday lost. Moving from 99.9% to 99.99% is about gaining back a handful of hours.
That last jump often costs the most.
Higher uptime targets usually mean:
- Redundant systems and data copies
- More expensive vendors or cloud services
- Tighter processes, change control, and monitoring
So the key question becomes simple: which systems deserve 99.99%, and which can live at 99.5% or 99.9%?
That is not an IT decision. That is a leadership decision, backed by input from your tech team.
A Simple Method To Set Uptime Targets With Your Tech Team
You do not need a 60-page reliability program to make progress. You need a clear, shared method.
1. Start With Customer And Cash Journeys
Ask a basic question: “Where does downtime hurt us most in money or trust?”
Typical high-impact areas include:
- Online ordering, bookings, or checkout
- Core line-of-business systems that run sales or operations
- Customer portals or apps that clients use daily
- Payment processing and billing
List 5 to 10 journeys that, if they fail, cause real damage. Give each a simple rating: high, medium, or low impact.
You now have a business list, not an IT list.
2. Map Systems To Tiers And Assign Uptime Targets
Next, bring in your tech lead and map those journeys to actual systems and vendors. Then create three tiers:
- Tier 1: Business-critical. If this fails, revenue stops, compliance is at risk, or customers lose trust fast.
- Tier 2: Important. Disruption is painful, but short outages are tolerable. Workarounds exist.
- Tier 3: Support. Helpful tools, but downtime does not stop the core business.
Agree on default uptime targets by tier, for example:
- Tier 1: 99.9% to 99.99%
- Tier 2: 99.5% to 99.9%
- Tier 3: 98% to 99.5%
Ask your team where the current systems sit today, not what they hope to reach in the future. This often reveals surprises, such as a critical revenue system that only has a weak vendor SLA.
The goal is a short list: system, tier, agreed uptime target.
3. Define How You Measure And Report Uptime
Uptime targets are useless if nobody agrees on how to measure them.
Have your tech lead answer in plain language:
- What counts as downtime? Only full outages, or also severe slowness?
- How will we track it? Tooling, logs, vendor reports?
- How often will we report uptime by tier to the leadership team?
You do not need perfect measurement on day one. You do need a simple, honest baseline.
From there, your tech team can propose actions: better monitoring, vendor changes, improved change process, or disaster recovery upgrades. You can judge those requests against clear business targets rather than vague fear of “another outage.”
Balance Uptime, Cost, And Risk Without The Drama
Many CEOs feel stuck between two bad options. Either accept outages as “just how it is,” or sign off on every new tool and upgrade to avoid blame.
Clear uptime targets give you a third path.
You can ask focused questions such as:
- “What would it cost to move this Tier 1 system from 99.5% to 99.9% uptime?”
- “If we accept 4 extra hours of yearly downtime here, how much do we save?”
- “Which single change would remove the biggest chunk of our outage risk?”
Now you are trading between dollars, hours, and risk in a visible way.
Uptime targets also help with external partners. Vendor SLAs often look fine at first glance, but when you compare the numbers to your own targets, gaps show up fast. You can push for better terms or adjust your design rather than hope for the best.
There is a security angle as well. A strong uptime plan is empty if a single ransomware event can wipe you out for a week. Your board does not care whether the disruption came from a failed upgrade or a cyber incident. They only see that you were down.
So ask your team how backup, incident response, and recovery plans support the uptime targets you have set. Reliability and security should tell one story.
Bringing It All Together
Uptime is not about chasing perfect numbers. It is about making clear, adult choices about reliability, cost, and risk.
When you set simple uptime targets with your tech team, you:
- Tie reliability to customer journeys and cash, not abstract IT goals
- Expose hidden gaps in vendor contracts and system design
- Create a shared language for trade-offs with your leadership team and board
You move from “Why are we always down?” to “We chose 99.9% here, and here is what we are doing to reach it.”
If you want a seasoned partner to help you turn uptime, security, and tech spending into a single, clear plan, take a look at CTO Input. Visit https://www.ctoinput.com to see how fractional senior-level technology leadership can sit on your side of the table, and explore practical guidance on the CTO Input blog to deepen your thinking on reliability, risk, and growth.