article
Reliability needs a price
Calling every service critical is how organisations fund none of them correctly.
Emil Shirokikh · Published September 5, 2026 · Updated September 23, 2026 · 2 min read
Abstract
Reliability is an economic choice. Availability targets should follow user harm, contractual exposure and recovery cost rather than executive anxiety.
Tie availability to harm
Calling everything critical prevents rational investment. Availability targets should follow user harm, contractual exposure and recovery economics.
Service tiering
For each service, define an indicator, objective, error budget, recovery target, redundancy cost and business owner who accepts residual risk.
Acceptance evidence
Fund the highest-consequence failure paths before polishing low-impact uptime.
Challenge the conclusion
Reputation is hard to quantify. That uncertainty supports conservative judgment, not infinite targets.
Use this in a working session
Compare the next unit of reliability spending across three services and ask which user harm it actually prevents.
BELTO editorial analysis. It does not describe a client engagement or claim a commercial result.
References
2 sourcesAuthor
Emil ShirokikhFounder
Founder of Belto Inc. Writes on engineering, venture building and applied intelligence.
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