Digital Armageddon – Global O365 outage hits!
During the great cloud rush, many organisations moved to various cloud environments, for the productivity advantages, improved reliability and security compared with running on premise environments. But the naysayers conveyed the risks associated of security concerns and outages, having the potential to bring down a company or even an economy if a there was a massive outage.
Based on InfoTrust analysis at the start of 2019 of over 9000 Australian company domain MX and SPF records, over a third of these organisations rely on Microsoft O365 Productivity suite.
This includes some of Australia’s largest organisations that would undoubtedly disrupt an economy if they were without email for a sustained period of time.
However, over the past few days we have seen considerable outages occurring across the globe to Microsoft email, as a result of Outlook connectivity issues, impacting customers ability to send and receive email from their desktop.
The issues reported have ranged from complete loss of email, missing emails, delay to email and duplication email. The feedback from Microsoft hasn’t been conclusive and reports that server reboots are being attempted to remediate.
For some businesses that depend on email in real time to deliver time-sensitive products or services, this is a major concern and the proposed resolutions being shared by Microsoft are equally alarming.
In the past, when there was an outage to the Exchange environment, the CEO would quickly be on the phone to the CIO and the conversation would go something like this:
CEO: “I’m unable to receive email – is this a widespread problem”.
CIO: “Yes, there has been an outage to XYZ server and we are working on a resolution”.
CEO: “When can we expect to get services operational”.
CIO: “Recovery of the server and email will take 28 minutes”.
CEO: “Great, call me in 30 minutes and keep me informed of any updates!”.
Nowadays, the CIO’s are left hitting refresh on Twitter to try and find the latest updates.
It’s days like today where companies that invested in O365 Continuity options are sitting smug.
InfoTrust has put together an Ultimate Guide to Securing Microsoft O365 that you can view here.
On the same page, you can watch a presentation on the topic, presented in late 2018 to an audience of CIO’s in Sydney.
InfoTrust is an O365 customer itself and eats its own cooking, so if you would like to see how we’ve secured our O365 instance, contact us.
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