IT disruption at Microsoft: Hopefully a wake-up call

After the serious disruption in the services of the IT group Microsoft last week, one question remains: Can you actually still use its services as a company, as an authority, as an NGO or as a private individual? You can - but only if a failure does not cause major problems. However, this answer was already valid before the latest major disruption. It just brought the topic into focus again.

Because the basic rule is: IT can fail. Through an attack, through errors or even through a power failure. Important systems must therefore be particularly well secured and designed to be resilient. The fact that they are not always that always leads to numerous problems. But with US services, and Microsoft is one of them, in addition to the usual failure scenarios, there is another, and not all that unrealistic one: the US government has the option of restricting their use abroad, for example for individual people or institutions.

Some time ago, the US government imposed sanctions on individual judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Recently, these were significantly expanded to include the court as a whole and can now also affect companies that provide services to the ICC. The court has prepared, for example switching its software to open source alternatives hosted in Europe. But the fact that the sanctions now potentially also apply to service providers shows how careless it would be to believe that a company is safe.

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In the best case scenario, the current outage was a wake-up call. Anyone who emails and manages appointments with Outlook, holds video conferences with teams and creates documents with Word and the AI ​​bot Copilot could now test for a few days without obligation whether such a failure can be tolerated. No? Then it would be high time for a plan to switch!