Many enterprises expect their IT operations to be up and running 99.99% of the time (or better). Part of the route to achieving this is robust software, application of relevant bug fixes, and well-defined troubleshooting procedures. This ensures that in the worst case scenario of an outage, the downtime is as minimal as possible.

Standardization again helps here—as we discussed in the preceding section on security, a good choice of underlying operating system ensures that you have ongoing access to bug fixes and updates, and if you know that your business needs a vendor backup to ensure business continuity, then the selection of a Linux operating system with a support contract (available with Red Hat or Canonical, for example) makes sense.

Equally, when servers are all built to a well-defined and understood standard, making changes to them should yield predictable results as everyone knows what they are working with. If all servers are built slightly differently, then a well-meaning change or update could have unintended consequences and result in costly downtime.

Again with standardization, even if the worst-case scenario occurs, everyone involved should know how to approach the problem because they will know that all servers have been built on a certain base image and have a certain configuration. This knowledge and confidence reduce troubleshooting times and ultimately downtime.