The recent Microsoft 365 outage got me thinking about something I’ve been discussing with business owners and management teams for many years.
Business continuity.
It’s one of those subjects that doesn’t usually get much attention until something goes wrong.
And I can understand why.
Business owners have enough to worry about. They’re managing employees, dealing with customers, watching expenses, trying to increase revenue, and making decisions every day.
When everything is working, spending time and money preparing for something that might never happen doesn’t seem particularly urgent.
But I’ve noticed something throughout my career.
Many businesses don’t really understand how dependent they’ve become on technology until that technology is no longer available.
And sometimes, the problem isn’t the technology itself.
It’s the assumptions we’ve made about it.
Microsoft is too big to go down. Right?
I’ve heard similar comments from business owners over the years.
“We use Microsoft. They’re a huge company.”
“Google has data centres everywhere.”
“QuickBooks is used by millions of businesses.”
“Everything is in the cloud now. We don’t need to worry about the servers.”
I understand the thinking.
These companies have enormous resources, sophisticated infrastructure, and teams of engineers working to keep their services available.
And most of the time, they do an excellent job.
But there’s a difference between something being reliable and something being guaranteed to work.
Microsoft can experience an outage.
Google can experience an outage.
QuickBooks, Shopify, payment processors, internet providers, and virtually every other technology service can experience an outage.
It doesn’t matter how big the company is.
And when something goes wrong, being a customer of one of the world’s largest technology companies doesn’t necessarily give you any more control over when the service will be restored.
You can contact support.
You can check the service status page.
You can wait for updates.
But if the problem is with the provider’s infrastructure, there’s often very little your own IT team can do to fix it.
Meanwhile, your business still needs to operate.
You can outsource the technology, but you can’t outsource the consequences of depending on it.
That’s something I think more business owners should consider.
Let me give you a simple example: a coffee shop.
I’ve used this example many times when discussing business continuity because I think it explains the problem better than any complicated technical discussion.
Imagine you own a coffee shop.
It’s a busy morning.
Your employees are there, the coffee machines are working, and customers are lining up to order their coffee.
Everything is running normally.
Then suddenly, your POS system stops working.
Maybe the internet connection is down.
Maybe the payment processor is experiencing problems.
Maybe the POS provider is having an outage.
It doesn’t really matter at that moment.
Your customers still want their coffee.
Your employees are still being paid.
Your rent and other operating expenses haven’t stopped.
So here’s my question.
Do you have cash in your register?
I mean actual cash.
Do you have enough smaller bills and coins to provide change?
If someone wants to pay $10 for a $6 coffee and pastry, can your employee accept the cash and give back $4?
Can they record the transaction manually?
Do they know the prices of your products without looking at the POS system?
Can they calculate the applicable taxes correctly?
And when the system comes back online, does someone know how to reconcile those transactions?
Or will everyone stand around waiting for the POS provider to fix the problem?
Think about that for a moment.
You have the employees.
You have the equipment.
You have the products.
You have customers who want to spend money.
But your business cannot sell a cup of coffee because nobody considered what would happen if the POS system stopped working.
And perhaps the solution was as simple as keeping some cash in the register, maintaining a basic price list, and teaching employees how to handle transactions manually.
Of course, that won’t work for every business or every situation. You still need proper records, cash controls, and reconciliation procedures.
But the point is that you might not need another expensive technology solution.
You might just need a better understanding of how your business operates.
That’s what business continuity means to me.
Not necessarily having a second POS system, a second internet connection, or another expensive piece of technology.
It’s about knowing what you need to keep your business operating when something doesn’t work.
Now think about what happens in other businesses.
Imagine a pub on a busy Friday night.
The restaurant is full, customers are ordering food and drinks, and suddenly the payment system becomes unavailable.
Can the business continue serving customers?
Does it have a procedure for accepting alternative payments?
How will employees record and reconcile transactions?
What happens if the outage lasts several hours?
Now imagine an e-commerce business.
Your online store or payment gateway becomes unavailable during a busy sales period.
Customers cannot complete their purchases.
Some transactions may have been interrupted.
You may not even know which orders were successfully processed.
How do you communicate with customers?
How do you recover those sales?
And how many customers will simply purchase from a competitor instead?
Or consider an event rental business.
Your email and booking systems stop working.
You have several events scheduled for tomorrow, customers are trying to confirm arrangements, and employees need access to schedules and customer information.
Can the business still coordinate those events?
Does anyone have an independent way to contact customers?
Can employees access the information they need without relying on the same unavailable systems?
Now consider an organization that relies heavily on Microsoft 365.
Email is unavailable.
Teams isn’t working.
SharePoint documents cannot be accessed.
Employees are sitting at their desks, trying to figure out what they can do.
Some might be able to continue working.
Others might have very little they can accomplish until the systems are restored.
And here’s another problem that I think many business owners overlook.
Have you ever calculated how much an outage actually costs your business?
When a service goes down, it’s easy to say:
“Well, Microsoft is having problems. There’s nothing we can do. We just have to wait.”
But waiting isn’t free.
Let’s say you have 30 employees.
For simplicity, let’s assume the average total employment cost is $50 per hour, including wages, benefits, and other employment-related expenses.
That’s $1,500 per hour.
Over an eight-hour workday, you’re paying approximately $12,000 in employee costs.
Now imagine your employees lose 75% of their productive working time because they cannot access the systems, documents, or communications they depend on.
That’s approximately $9,000 worth of paid working time affected in one day.
I’m not suggesting that you’ve automatically lost $9,000 in cash.
Some employees can work on other activities. Some delayed work can be completed later.
But your business is still paying for that capacity, whether it’s being used productively or not.
And that’s only one part of the equation.
What about customers who couldn’t place orders?
Sales that never happened?
Projects that fell behind schedule?
Employees who need to work overtime afterward to catch up?
Managers spending hours coordinating workarounds?
Contractual obligations, deadlines, or other commitments that still need to be met?
And what about the business opportunities you might have missed while everyone was waiting for the system to come back?
Not all of these costs will apply to every business, and not all of them represent permanent financial losses.
But they deserve consideration.
I’ve seen businesses question whether spending a few hundred dollars on preparation, documentation, or employee training is really necessary.
Yet those same businesses may have thousands of dollars in productive capacity affected by a single day of disruption.
Have you ever calculated what one hour, one day, or two days of downtime would actually mean for your business?
If you haven’t, how do you know whether preparing for it is too expensive?
That’s the part I find interesting.
Business owners regularly evaluate investments based on cost, profitability, and return.
But business continuity is often treated as an IT expense rather than a business decision.
Having backups doesn’t necessarily mean your business can continue operating.
Another answer I often hear is:
“We’re okay. Everything is backed up.”
That’s good.
Backups are important.
But let’s think about what that actually means.
If your documents are backed up, can employees access them while the primary system is unavailable?
Who has the authority to retrieve those documents?
How will you verify the identity of someone requesting confidential information?
And if your normal email and file-sharing systems are unavailable, how will you securely deliver those documents?
What if the backup platform depends on the same identity or authentication services that are experiencing problems?
Having a backup copy of your information doesn’t automatically mean your employees can continue doing their jobs.
Backups help protect information and support recovery.
Business continuity is about keeping essential activities functioning during a disruption.
They’re related, but they’re not the same thing.
And there’s another issue.
When employees cannot access the systems they normally use, they often start finding their own solutions.
Someone might use a personal Gmail account to contact a customer.
Someone else might transfer company documents using an unauthorized file-sharing service.
Another employee might start keeping customer information in a personal spreadsheet.
They’re not necessarily trying to do anything wrong.
They’re trying to get their work done.
But who decided those alternatives were acceptable?
Where is the business information going?
How will the records be maintained?
Who is responsible if something goes wrong?
A business can experience a technology outage and unintentionally create a security or information-management problem while trying to work around it.
This is why I believe business continuity, cybersecurity, information management, and operational accountability are connected.
They aren’t just IT issues.
They’re business issues.
The answer isn’t always more technology.
I think this is where some businesses make another mistake.
A system fails, and the immediate reaction is to purchase another system.
The internet goes down? Buy another internet connection.
Email goes down? Buy another communication platform.
Documents become unavailable? Buy another backup solution.
Sometimes those investments are absolutely justified.
But before recommending anything, I would want to understand the business.
What activities are essential?
Which activities can wait?
How long can the business reasonably tolerate an interruption?
What would an interruption cost?
What alternatives are available?
Who is responsible for making decisions?
And how much would it cost to reduce the risk?
The coffee shop might need a small amount of cash and a manual transaction procedure.
An event rental company might need an independent customer contact list and access to upcoming event schedules.
A larger organization with regulatory obligations, confidential information, and complex business operations may need something much more structured.
Different businesses have different requirements.
I don’t believe every business needs expensive redundancy or a complicated disaster recovery system.
In fact, sometimes accepting the risk is the most reasonable business decision.
If an outage is unlikely, the consequences are manageable, and the cost of preventing it is significantly higher than the potential impact, accepting that risk may make sense.
But someone needs to understand the risk and make that decision.
Not simply assume everything will keep working because it always has.
Risk management isn’t about eliminating every risk. It’s about understanding what you’re accepting and being prepared for the consequences.
And now we’re introducing AI into almost everything.
There’s another reason I’ve been thinking about this more lately.
AI.
I see enormous potential in AI, and I think it will change how businesses operate in many positive ways.
We’re already seeing organizations use AI to develop software, automate processes, analyze information, support decisions, and connect different business systems.
Things that previously required significant time and resources can now be accomplished much faster.
That’s exciting.
But I also wonder whether some organizations are moving faster than their ability to understand and manage what they’re building.
When AI makes it easier to automate ten different business processes, does anyone stop to consider what happens when one of those systems fails?
When software can be developed and changed much faster, are organizations maintaining appropriate testing, oversight, and change management?
When multiple business activities become dependent on interconnected systems, does anyone understand how a failure in one component might affect everything else?
And when an automated process makes a mistake, how quickly can that mistake spread before someone notices?
I’m not suggesting AI caused the recent Microsoft outage, and I don’t think we can confidently say that AI will necessarily cause more outages.
AI may also help organizations prevent failures, identify problems, and recover more quickly.
But I do suspect we’re going to encounter new kinds of operational challenges as AI becomes more deeply integrated into businesses.
The technology is becoming more capable.
Our dependencies are becoming more complicated.
And the need for management oversight isn’t disappearing.
If anything, I think it’s becoming more important.
Because automation can make a business more efficient, but it can also make the business more dependent on systems that employees no longer fully understand.
Sometimes the real problem isn’t technology.
Throughout my career, I’ve worked with businesses of different sizes, industries, and levels of maturity.
And one thing I’ve learned is that many problems that appear to be technology problems are actually business management problems.
Unclear responsibilities.
Missing procedures.
Decisions that nobody realized needed to be made.
Risks that nobody has evaluated.
Or simply the assumption that because something has worked for years, it will continue working tomorrow.
That’s one of the reasons I founded VYINGS.
I’ve never believed technology leadership should be limited to managing computers, implementing software, or responding when something breaks.
Those activities are important, but they are only part of the picture.
I’m more interested in understanding how a business actually operates, where its dependencies are, what risks it faces, and whether its technology decisions make financial and operational sense.
Sometimes that means recommending new technology.
Sometimes it means improving a process.
Sometimes it means helping management understand a risk they haven’t considered.
And sometimes it means telling a business owner that spending more money on technology isn’t the answer.
The coffee shop example is a good illustration.
If keeping some cash in the register and training employees on a simple manual procedure can keep the business operating during a POS outage, why would I immediately recommend an expensive technical solution?
I would rather help the owner solve the actual problem.
What happens after everything comes back online?
Eventually, Microsoft’s services will be restored.
Employees will catch up on their emails.
Documents will become accessible again.
Meetings will resume.
Most businesses will return to normal.
And after a few days, many people will probably stop thinking about the outage.
Until the next one.
That’s what concerns me.
Not that technology occasionally fails.
We already know that it does.
What concerns me is how often businesses experience a disruption, recover from it, and then continue operating with exactly the same assumptions they had before.
No discussion about what happened.
No assessment of the financial impact.
No review of what employees actually did.
No decision about whether anything should change.
Just back to business as usual.
I don’t think every outage needs to result in a major project or another technology investment.
But I do think it should create an opportunity to learn something about how the business operates.
So if you’re a business owner, here’s something worth asking yourself.
If the technology your business depends on stopped working tomorrow morning, what would your employees actually do?
Would they know how to continue serving customers?
Would they have access to the information they need?
Would they know which alternative procedures are acceptable?
Would someone have the authority to make decisions?
And perhaps most importantly:
Do you know how much money your business would be losing while everyone waits for the technology to come back?
Because the next time a major service goes down, the question isn’t just how long Microsoft, Google, QuickBooks, or another provider will take to fix it.
The question is how well your business can operate while they’re fixing it.
And that’s a responsibility that still belongs to the business owner.
