A recent Microsoft outage has highlighted the dependence of businesses on technology, with many companies grinding to a halt when email, calendars, and meetings were disrupted. According to Matt Saunders, Field CTO at Adaptavist, the outage had a disabling effect on a huge number of organizations.
Paul Adams, Group Technical Director at Utilize, points out that the biggest risk for businesses isn’t the outage itself, but the fact that many organizations have built their entire working day around the assumption that these services will always be available. When email, calendars, documents, and chat all sit within the same ecosystem, a disruption can affect far more than one application.
Matt Falconer, CEO and Co-Founder of Ares Intelligence, believes that the same dependence is building around AI tools. He sees the Microsoft outage as a reminder of what losing access to essential technology could look like, and argues that businesses are handing more work to AI models they don’t own or control, meaning access could disappear through a technical fault, a commercial decision, or a geopolitical one.
Vladimir Beskorovainyi, Enterprise AI Architect and CTO at Besk Tech, notes that the sign-in process is a weak spot, as many systems rely on the same identity provider. Losing access to it can lock employees out of those systems at the same time. He also points out that having a spare provider won’t help if you can’t log in to it, and that multi-cloud solutions are often ineffective.
Understanding the Risks of Dependence on Technology
Rob Mueller, Founder, Director, and Chief Technical Officer at Fastmail, suggests that using independent products linked through open standards can provide a more resilient solution. This approach allows different providers to communicate, and each piece can be chosen on its merits, with each piece able to fail without taking the others down.
Jens Hagel, Founder and Owner of Kjello, notes that his firm has moved clients to Microsoft’s cloud instead of keeping Exchange servers in-house, and believes that this decision has reduced the risk of outages. However, he also points out that few firms have written down what they do while a service is down, and that having a written emergency plan is essential.
Mel Owen, Founder of TimeToPost, advises businesses to identify the three services that would halt revenue if they vanished for a day, and write down the manual fallback for each. This includes having a second channel for customer updates, keeping critical files somewhere they can be opened offline, and testing the fallback once a quarter.
As Saunders notes, preparing for an outage is difficult, but starting with a small habit, such as thinking about how to get tasks done without online systems, can help. The key is to understand where reliance on one provider creates risk and having a plan for working without the systems a business already uses.
Planning for the Unexpected
Beskorovainyi advises businesses to know which systems can still authenticate users without their usual provider and keep an emergency access route that doesn’t depend on the systems they’re trying to survive losing. He also recommends testing the plan quarterly, as an untested failover is a plan, not a capability.
In three recent infrastructure reviews, he found that not one company had a written emergency plan. He believes that one page is enough to get started, covering who makes decisions, how staff reach each other when Teams and email are gone, and which tasks need to carry on by phone or on paper.
He recommends testing quarterly, to ensure the plan works. Owen also suggests testing the fallback every quarter, rather than during an outage. This helps ensure employees know how to use the alternative systems.
Implementing a Plan
By following this rule, businesses can ensure they’re prepared for an outage.
He notes that a distributed ecosystem gives a smaller blast radius on any failures, and resilience through diversity of suppliers.
Hagel’s experience has shown that a server run by a small firm fails more often than Microsoft’s services. He believes that leaving Microsoft is not the answer for most companies. Instead, businesses should focus on having a written emergency plan, which can be as simple as one page.
