Microsoft's cloud BPOS suffers outage ahead of Office 360 launch

Gartner analyst argues that CIOs should have business continuity plans in place in case of outage

Microsoft's cloud communication tool, Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), suffered an outage yesterday affecting customers in North America.

The tech giant informed its customers via twitter that it was suffering from a "network connectivity issue", but that it was "working to restore service".

It followed this up by saying that faulty hardware components had been replaced.

This news comes just a few days ahead of Microsoft's latest cloud offering, Office 365, which will see hosted versions of Microsoft's desktop applications and its server products.

One IT professional on Twitter asked Microsoft during the BPOS outage whether there was any reason to believe that Office 365 would be more reliable, to which Microsoft responded - "Yes, O365 should provide a more stable service. It is built from ground up and reports and expectations are very good".

Richard Edwards, analyst at Ovum, argues that cloud outages should come as a warning to companies looking to simply save on costs.

"Before an organisation opts for a cloud service, it needs to assess what an outage would mean for the business. If the business is demanding cloud services because they are cheaper than in-house services, a CIO should make the CEO aware an outage of some sort is at least possible, and they should work out what this would mean for the company," said Edwards.

"Google, Dropbox and Amazon have all had similar outages, and it's embarrassing for them. But it's also important to note how the service provider deals with the incident. They need to be completely transparent, and if they are, it is important to know exactly what has happened and what exactly they are doing to ensure it doesn't happen again," he added.

"Companies must always have a business continuity plan to ensure that a level of business operation can be maintained should they face an outage."