Microsoft Cloud Outage Affect a Large Number of Customers

Everywhere you turn these days, the Cloud is being talked about. This ambiguous term seems to encompass almost everything from personal email or file sharing solutions to corporately packaged enterprise services. While the Cloud is just a datacenter’s IT services invariably delivered on someone else’s hardware, cloud computing is what people are talking about these days. Cloud computing in its basic definition, is the delivery of hosted services over the internet, through a network of remote servers. These remote servers are busy storing, managing, and processing data.

According to Gartner, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) are today the leading Cloud service providers globally. With public cloud services set to rise to a total of $246.8 billion, (18% up from last year). With these figures in view, it’s fair to say that most organisations today, will utilise some form of Cloud services whether that be:

• IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)
• PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)
• SaaS (Software-as-Service)

During this month, many users were affected by Microsoft’s Office 365 service disruption affecting the UK, Netherlands, parts of Europe, Middle East and South Africa.

What is the impact?

The obvious answer is business disruption let’s consider why:

• Email downtime affects customers – With Office 365 email being a dominant form of business communication. Customer responses can’t be sent quickly which can create negative perceptions, reputational damage and could even cause them to switch to a competitor.
• Outages affect internal uses too – Internal workflows not being able to receive information from colleagues, or meet the temptation to use external email or public file sharing tools is high, each with its own security risks and potentially catastrophic consequences if these tools have a security breach.

What is SCC’s Solution?

Clearly, every incident will present different business challenges, but effectively a more proactive solution can benefit organisations who are unaware of when an outage could occur.

Proactively monitoring inbound and outbound email flow and setting thresholds to trigger email continuity service, protects email users from potential Office 365 disruption. This keeps users productive, allowing them to send and receive emails securely, view calendar information or archive emails; all which make for a great user experience.

To mitigate the single vendor risk with Office 365, a multi-cloud strategy which includes Mimecast Continuity Service, means that your emails are always on and accessible even during an Office 365 outage. You keep control of business-critical email communications. Email communication workflows, and access to business information are accessible from mobile or desktop devices, transparently, with existing security and compliance policies in place until the Office 365 service has been restored.

How Can SCC Help?

Contact SCC to take advantage of the free Mimecast Continuity Service workshop to help you understand, plan and mitigate any issues within your organisation.