Beyond MTTR: Why The Future Of It Is Preventative, Not Reactive
Cisco, Wednesday, April 1st, 2026
For years, we measured success by how fast we could fix broken systems. Then we had an outage that changed everything. We realized we weren't measuring the right thing. The real win wasn't speed-it was prevention. By unifying our observability data, we can now stop problems forming before they hit our users.
For a long time, Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) has been 'the' metric that drives IT teams, often used as the ultimate measure of success for digital resilience.
But what if I told you that in Cisco IT, MTTR is no longer the sole focus? In the past 18 months, we've dramatically reduced incidents - not only by responding faster, but also preventing problems before they happen.