In today’s digital-first landscape, companies demand high availability, reliability, and performance from their systems — all day, every day. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) plays a crucial role in ensuring this level of operational excellence. However, setting up a 24×7 SRE team isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. It requires careful planning, resource alignment, and a solid strategy to overcome common pitfalls. Let’s explore the major challenges companies face when building a round-the-clock SRE team and how to effectively address them.
1. Hiring and Retaining Skilled Talent
One of the biggest hurdles is finding SRE professionals with the right blend of software engineering and systems administration expertise. Add to that the need for global coverage and rotational shifts, and the talent pool becomes even narrower.
Solution:
To address this, companies must expand their search globally, consider remote-first hiring models, and offer competitive compensation tailored to the region. Additionally, investing in internal training programs and certifications can help grow talent from within. Establishing a strong company culture and providing growth opportunities are key to retaining skilled engineers.
2. Preventing Burnout from On-Call Fatigue
Operating 24×7 means someone is always on-call — and if not managed carefully, this can quickly lead to burnout. Engineers repeatedly waking up at 3 a.m. to deal with alerts will eventually feel demoralized and disengaged.
Solution:
Implement a sustainable on-call rotation that distributes workload evenly. Use tools and automation to reduce alert fatigue, and ensure only actionable, high-priority incidents are escalated. Also, foster a culture that values post-incident reviews and learning, rather than blame. Offering compensatory time off after stressful incidents can also help maintain morale.
3. Maintaining Knowledge Continuity Across Shifts
With teams working in different time zones, critical information can get lost during handoffs. This leads to repeated issues, inefficient troubleshooting, and delays in resolution.
Solution:
Establish strong documentation practices and handover protocols. Use shift transition reports, collaborative runbooks, and central knowledge repositories to ensure all engineers have access to relevant historical context. Tools like Slack integrations, JIRA, and PagerDuty can be configured to facilitate seamless transitions and track incidents effectively.
4. Balancing Automation with Human Oversight
Automation is a cornerstone of SRE — it reduces toil and improves response times. However, over-reliance on automation without sufficient oversight can be risky, especially during unforeseen or complex incidents.
Solution:
Strike a balance by automating repetitive, predictable tasks like log aggregation, alerting, and deployment rollbacks, while ensuring that decision-critical processes still involve human judgment. Conduct regular reviews of automated workflows and maintain clear escalation paths for intervention when needed.
5. Cultural and Communication Barriers in Global Teams
24×7 SRE often means having teams spread across continents. Differences in language, communication styles, and working hours can create misunderstandings and reduce team cohesion.
Solution:
Foster a shared team culture through regular cross-regional sync-ups, virtual team-building activities, and inclusive communication practices. Encourage documentation in a standardized format and make use of asynchronous communication to bridge time zone gaps. Tools like Confluence, Loom, or Notion can help in creating a transparent and accessible knowledge base.
6 Budget Constraints and Justifying ROI
A full-fledged SRE team running round the clock is a significant investment. Decision-makers may question the ROI, especially in early stages when the benefits aren’t immediately visible.
Solution:
Demonstrate value through metrics — reduced downtime, faster MTTR (mean time to recovery), improved customer satisfaction scores, and increased system reliability. Use incident tracking data to highlight how SRE efforts directly impact business continuity and user trust. Also, compare the cost of downtime to the cost of running a 24×7 team to contextualize the long-term financial benefits.
7. Tooling and Infrastructure Readiness
Even the best engineers can’t perform without the right tools. Setting up observability, monitoring, alerting, CI/CD pipelines, and incident response platforms is foundational but often overlooked in the initial planning stages.
Solution:
Prioritize building a robust tech stack before going live with a 24×7 model. Evaluate and integrate best-in-class tools for monitoring (like Prometheus, Datadog), alerting (PagerDuty, Opsgenie), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible). Continuous improvement should be built into the process, with regular audits of tooling effectiveness.
Conclusion:
While setting up a 24×7 SRE team is no small feat, with the right approach, tools, and mindset, it can become a powerful force for business reliability and growth. From managing talent and culture to fine-tuning automation and workflows, each challenge is an opportunity to strengthen your operations.
For organizations seeking a reliable partner in this journey, Allysum Global stands out as a strategic ally. With deep expertise in building and managing resilient SRE practices, Allysum Global offers customized solutions that align with your operational goals and business scale — helping you achieve 24×7 uptime with confidence and efficiency.