Further Office 365 and Azure outages 'could have a detrimental impact on the running of the country' warns Mimecast

Customers should avoid putting all eggs in one basket, says Exchange partner

A growing dependence on Microsoft cloud ecosystems could see events such as today's Office 365 and Azure outages have "a detrimental impact on the running of the country", Microsoft Exchange partner Mimecast has warned.

Speaking to Computing after today's outage - which lasted around four hours and the damage from which to UK enterprise is still to be calculated - cloud email management firm Mimecast's cyber security specialist, Orlando Scott-Cowley, advised that IT leaders, and especially those in the public sector, should not "put all [its] eggs in one basket" when choosing a cloud service.

"The position we take is that there's risk associated with using a single cloud vendor," said Scott-Cowley.

"If you put all your eggs in one basket, you're exposing yourself to risk. So whether that's Office 365, or IBM or Google for Work or any provider, flattening the entire ecosystem you had in a network or through a variety of other cloud providers into a single cloud vendor, you lose the resilience you once had with systems that could fail - and recover - independently," he said.

But the inherent "complexity" of services such as Office 365 and Azure, said Scott-Cowley, means that "what conceivably could be quite a small problem for [users] turns out to be quite a big problem for lots of people".

Scott-Cowley, perhaps unsurprisingly, would recommend taking on a secondary cloud provider to "filter and process" mail with their own servers which, said Cowley, can become the primary mail server in the event of an outage.

"It would be unrealistic to expect there would never be outages," Scott-Cowley told Computing.

"So managing the risk of downtime and unavailability, putting in a secondary, third-party provider is ideal as it effectively de-risks the inevitable bad day that Office 365 is going to have, and had today.

"As more and more customers subscribe to cloud services and move productivity into Office 365, the impact of an outage or problem becomes wider and broader. A lot more people will be affected, and the noise becomes louder.

"And when you think of the uptake of those kinds of services within government and the public sector, the impact can be quite significant and could have a detrimental impact on the running of the country," he concluded.

This article is part of a Mimecast campaign