How to Stop Network Outages from Hurting Your Business: A Practical Guide

1. Cultivate a Culture of Blameless Learning and Preparedness with Automation

Implement Blameless Postmortems

A leading cause of network outages is human error due to manual network practices. Teams are hesitant to share crucial details if they believe they’ll be held accountable. Gartner’s recommendation is to focus on the process, not the person, stating that “blameless postmortems are necessary because punishing individuals for failures discourages engineers from sharing the essential details needed to understand the cause of an outage.”

NetBrain enables this by providing an irrefutable, automated record of every change and its impact. Instead of guessing what happened during an outage, NetBrain’s dynamic maps and change tracking show exactly what changed, when, and what the outcome was. This removes blame and focuses the conversation on improving processes.

• Gartner estimates that “organizations who consistently and thoroughly foster a blameless postmortem culture will improve outage resolution times by 20%, on average, due to increased collaboration and openness.”

2. Run Tabletop Exercises with a Live Digital Twin

How would your team respond if a key data center lost power? With NetBrain, your tabletop exercises move from theoretical discussion to hands-on practice in a risk-free environment. Our live digital twin technology allows you to validate network configuration, change and security.

We think, this practice aligns with Gartner’s recommendation to use “tabletop exercises focused on network outage simulations to help prepare and identify critical aspects of network infrastructure (internal and provider) and their outage tolerance.” Gartner estimates that organizations following this practice “will reduce the number of unplanned outages by 10%, and also improve resolution times by 10%.”

3. Adopt Smarter NetOps Practices: The Foundation of NetBrain

Embrace an “Antifragile” Mindset

NetBrain is built for an antifragile network. In our opinion, our platform empowers you to implement Gartner’s advice directly: “we recommend implementing antifragile practices for changes. The mantra of ‘fail small, find it fast and fix it fast’ should be applied to network changes.”

• Avoid “Big Bang” Changes: NetBrain’s intent-based automation allows you to break complex changes into smaller, validated scripts. This aligns with Gartner’s finding that “network leaders should encourage breaking network changes into smaller impact units, implementing in more phases and having simple backout plans,” a practice they estimate “will reduce the number of unplanned outages by 20%.”
• Validate Before, During and After Changes: Use NetBrain to benchmark the network before changes, automated intent validation during changes, and review results after changes for production infrastructure including links, router and firewall configurations, and load balancers. We believe, this operationalizes Gartner’s guidance that: “regular network unit testing consequently reduces the number of incidents and improves the ability to recover quickly, reducing MTTR, and ultimately helping the network withstand larger shocks.”

Automate to Eliminate Human Error

NetBrain directly addresses the core issue Gartner identifies: “Gartner estimates that more than 60% of enterprise network changes are made manually. Further, multiple surveys show that human error is a leading cause of network outages.”

Our platform operationalizes Gartner’s automation recommendations by providing a single source of truth for standardized configurations and enabling automated pre-change validation, deployment, and post-change rollback.

4. Ruthlessly Reduce Complexity by Eliminating Configuration Drift

NetBrain automates the fight against technical debt, which Gartner notes “many enterprises carry moderate to high levels of technical debt in their networks, which increases unplanned downtime.” Gartner further states that: “technical entropy — specifically configuration drift — is the primary contributor to networking technical debt.” Our platform leverages hundreds of pre-built no-code automations to continuously assesses your network, comparing running configurations against your approved baselines. It automatically identifies and alerts on configuration drift, giving you the actionable intelligence needed to maintain standardized templates and eliminate the unnecessary configurations Gartner highlights.

5. Invest in Key Technologies: NetBrain as Your Force Multiplier

Leverage Digital Twins for Safe Validation

NetBrain’s live intent-based digital twin is a core differentiator. It allows you to create a virtual replica of your live network to safely test any change before it touches production.

This is exactly the technology Gartner calls out, stating that “network digital twins are available from multiple network vendors and help with validation of networking configuration, security, and data plane changes.” Gartner estimates that “organizations that require digital twins within network change control processes will reduce their unplanned outages associated with changes by at least 40%.”

The Bottom Line

Preventing network outages requires more than just robust hardware. It demands the cultural and operational shifts Gartner prescribes. NetBrain provides the platform to make it happen, we believe turning Gartner’s strategies into automated, executable workflows.

By leveraging NetBrain’s intent-based automation and digital twin technology, you can move from hoping your network is resilient to knowing it is antifragile—actively getting stronger with every change and challenge it faces.

Source:
Gartner, “Key Practices to Reduce Network Downtime”, Andrew Lerner, Tim Zimmerman, et al., 3 September 2025. (ID G00835982).

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