The Importance of a Highly Available Culture

Building and maintaining technology systems that are always available to their users—as in 24 hours a day, 365 days per year—is not a simple endeavor. Engineering such high availability for a given system or application requires not only a mix of advanced, unfailingly reliable technologies and services, but also a particular culture within the organization responsible for keeping said system perpetually online. 

For the systems that support the federal government’s most critical missions, high availability is an absolute necessity. Critical mission systems ensure that critical government services are accessible, functioning properly—and in the rare and unfortunate event of a service disruption—that they are returned to operational status as close to immediately as possible.

Mission-critical systems require high availability because they fundamentally support mission execution. Whether it’s an agent in the field relying on a system for real-time data to inform decision making or a citizen accessing benefits, these systems are critical to carrying out the mission of an agency.

For example, a disruption in the Internal Revenue Service’s tax processing system during tax season could delay the processing of tax returns, refunds, and payments. Such delay could cause significant financial consequences for the government, businesses, and citizens alike.

Critical mission systems often must integrate modern components with legacy architectures while maintaining strict security and compliance with government regulations. They also typically handle immense amounts of data. These aspects contribute to the complexity of maintaining their never-fail status.

Technology is often cited as the key factor when discussing the feasibility and success of highly available systems, but the human component—or culture—is equally important.

Culture plays a central role in the success and failure of these systems because they are essentially reliant on people and processes to drive and maintain their operational excellence. Operational excellence means consistently achieving optimal performance through meticulous planning, robust infrastructure, clear operational processes, and proactive IT management to maintain functionality under normal and adverse system conditions. Technology alone cannot guarantee continuous, always-available service without the strategic and collaborative efforts of the people developing and managing the systems in play, thus the importance of high availability culture.

A highly available culture tends to focus on preventing failure. Focusing on failure in highly available systems creates a culture where discussing and addressing failure is not only accepted but encouraged. This level of openness is critical because it destigmatizes failure and further builds a culture of improvement and learning.

Based on our experience in establishing high availability cultures across numerous government agencies, we have found some common cultural characteristics that promote success.

Fundamentally, high availability culture is a mindset that permeates every aspect of an organization from leadership to the day-to-day operations manager. Developing an enterprise-wide high availability mindset begins at the top with committed leadership support.

Leadership support means emphasizing the importance of high availability to the mission and across the enterprise, allocating the necessary resources, and setting a strong example by prioritizing uptime and accountability in decision-making processes. Leadership can further support a high availability culture by establishing regular system updates, feedback loops, and inter-department coordination and collaboration.

Continuous system uptime and reliability are central focuses of a high availability mindset. Thus, a key aspect of a high availability mindset is the proactive anticipation of potential failures through system reviews, team check-ins, tabletop exercises, investments in system telemetry, chaos testing, and dedicated roles. Rather than reacting to issues as they arise, efforts must be made to foresee and mitigate risks before they impact operations. Highly availability culture supports this with upfront preparations such as redundant architecture, testing, and clear recovery protocols with designated points of contact. It’s this upfront collaboration between teams that makes highly available systems possible. 

Employee engagement and ownership of roles is another critical element. Employees who are knowledgeable and confident in their roles can contribute most effectively to maintaining system reliability. Ingraining such ownership and engagement involves creating an environment where open communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement is embedded in the culture.

High availability mindsets are developed from a culture that promotes system resilience, proactive problem solving, accountability throughout the enterprise, and continuous delivery. Through regular system updates and improvements, continuous delivery affords swift adaption to emerging threats and technology advancements. 

A high availability culture must be fundamentally preoccupied with preventing failure, and thus achieving maximum uptime and continuous operations. Focusing on preventing failure in developing highly available systems helps to build a culture of improvement and learning where discussing and addressing failure is not only accepted but expected and encouraged.

This preoccupation with failure means anticipating and mitigating potential issues before they become critical concerns and taking a proactive, not reactive, approach to high system availability. Upfront preparations baked into the architecture and infused across every team reduce future burden and posture the system for minimal downtime.

Being obsessed with failure, high availability agencies and teams are constantly analyzing their systems to identify vulnerabilities and potential failure points through regular risk assessments. Good programs constantly look for new ways to measure and proactively respond to issues before they become failures or disrupt the mission. Programmatic improvement requires prioritized, dedicated investments alongside architectures that implement high availability best practices. By focusing on what could potentially go wrong, high availability teams will implement robust preventative measures and ensure there are multiple layers of defense so the system can function even if a component fails. Additionally, an obsession with failure emphasizes the importance of continuous monitoring and regular maintenance.

When failure is treated as a constantly lurking possibility that must be headed off at every turn, employees become more aware of the impact of their actions on the availability of the system. This approach ensures each team member understands their critical contribution to maintaining system uptime. Continual role evaluation instills a proactive, vigilant mindset focused on preventing and mitigating issues. Regular assessment is important because threats evolve and requirements change.

Highly available systems are engineered to maintain near-zero downtime and continuous operation, but, however passionately and skillfully pursued, this remains an aspiration that cannot be fully guaranteed. There are innumerable variables at play and natural limitations to a system being available all the time, including real-world conditions, unanticipated issues, evolving threats, human error, and system maintenance. When these rare events occur, a high availability culture organization is committed to learning from them. Every incident or system failure, no matter how small or brief, provides opportunities for insight into potential vulnerabilities and improvement areas.

Continuous improvement is fundamental to high availability culture, and teams must incorporate lessons learned from incidents to gain insight, refine processes, and collaborate on strategies to enhance resilience and reliability moving forward. This means prioritizing postmortem action items across all roles to make sure that any system weakness is thoroughly addressed, and operational procedures and processes are updated and codified through centers of excellence, design patterns, and review boards. Vigorous investigation of any failure also provides insight into the effectiveness of real-time response procedures. This helps teams become better prepared to handle and head off future incidents more effectively.

It's worth emphasizing again: When incidents occur, failures are openly discussed and analyzed, without blame, employees feel empowered to identify future potential issues and propose solutions. Discussing failure in a high availability culture promotes transparency, continuous learning, and innovation.

True high availability culture cannot be an afterthought—it takes intention. Creating a high availability culture is indispensable to the success of mission critical, highly available systems. Technology can provide the tools, but it is an organization’s people and culture that will ensure that its systems achieve and maintain the goal of uninterrupted service.