Every so often, a major retailer makes headlines when its website goes haywire. But online glitches endanger small businesses, too.

"Lost revenues and tarnished corporate and personal images don't discriminate by industry sector or company size," writes James Sivis at MarketingProfs. "Online disasters can happen to anyone. And the last thing any of us wants or needs is bad press and irate customers."

According to Sivis, these catastrophic outages tend to happen for a few different reasons:

• Operator error accounts for 40% of technical problems.
• Bugs and other application failures cause another 40%.
• And the balance of 20% can be attributed to hardware or operating system failures, as well as environmental issues and natural disasters.

So how can you best preempt outages—and keep your website running at optimal levels? The key, argues Sivis, is to ensure your marketing and IT departments have a performance-visualization system that holistically monitors all aspects of your site, and provides everyone with the same unified view.

"Marketing and IT should be looking at the same issue," he says. "[And that means] IT is constantly aware of Marketing's business considerations, and Marketing can see the real-time performance of IT operations that have an impact on [its] concerns and initiatives." Not only will your website run more smoothly and profitably, but energy previously spent on power struggles and finger-pointing can be channeled into making cooperative progress.

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