Global IT disruptions and outages are becoming the new normal, testing the operational resilience of businesses everywhere. How well prepared your team is to handle major incidents determines how fast the business can return to normal. Operations Centers are relied on to manage these disruptions and ensure quick recovery. They’re the point of entry for incoming data that holds important signals of impending failure that impact customers, the business, and the bottom line.

One of the first key tenets of cloud computing was that “you own your own availability”, the idea being that the public cloud providers were making infrastructure available to you, and your organization had to decide what to use and how to use it in order to meet your organization’s goals. The cloud providers have no knowledge of your applications or their KPIs.

The recent global outage reminds us that identifying issues and their impact radius is just the first part of a lengthy process to remediation. Incidents are inevitable; how we prepare for and learn from them is what sets teams up to respond more effectively next time. As we saw from the remediation steps taken by enterprises around the world, implementing a known fix across a large number of environments that are potentially managed by a number of distributed teams can be a gargantuan challenge.

Software is not perfect. And ultimately, it’s not a matter of if you will have an outage, but of when. With the increasing complexity and frequency of IT incidents, is your organization prepared to respond and recover when each second counts? Here at PagerDuty, we’ve compiled a list of best practices to keep your systems up and running.