Azure outages should spark new urgency for a multi-cloud approach

July 19th 2024 will go down as a tough day for many IT teams, and the day started even worse for businesses using Microsoft Azure and its supported services. In addition to the widely publicized global outage caused by a CrowdStrike update, Microsoft Azure's Central US Region was down for five hours due to an unrelated failure, impacting millions of business users worldwide.

As if that wasn't enough, less than two weeks later, Microsoft Azure experienced another global outage lasting more than six hours. According to the company's service status page, it was Microsoft's 8th service status-related incident.

Currently, many IT leaders are focused on preventing outages on the scale of the CrowdStrike and Microsoft Azure incidents. These recent outages show that even reliable market leaders can have 'off days,' posing a significant risk to organizations. The incidents also remind IT leaders of the importance of adopting a diversified, multi-cloud strategy. Multiple cloud platforms and built-in multi-layer, high-availability system recovery protocols ensure business continuity even if one or more cloud providers experience disruption.

The risk of over-reliance for SMEs

It's difficult to understate the importance of Microsoft Azure's cloud services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Microsoft has long made a play for SME cloud operations with Azure, offering accessible cloud pricing and perks such as bundled Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) services. That strategy has played a significant role in the Redmond, WA giant securing a quarter of the global cloud services market as of Q1 2024.

The downside of that domination meant that many businesses spent several hours on July 19th unable to access Azure-powered cloud storage services such as SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, restricting their access to business-critical files. This downtime also spelled trouble for SMEs using apps and services deployed on Azure Central, as those were degraded or taken offline entirely.

The bottom line for SMEs? Lost confidence, lost customers and ultimately lost revenue.

Time to think (or re-think) about multi-cloud

SME IT teams should take this moment to re-evaluate a multi-cloud strategy, whether further diversifying their cloud deployments or embarking on a multi-cloud journey for the first time.
Diversifying deployments across multiple vendors improves resilience by allowing businesses to switch critical workloads to unaffected environments in an outage. Crucially, that doesn’t mean deploying across different environments from the same provider unless they clearly state that they are independent with isolated networks and power. Outages can sometimes be provider-wide, as we saw on July 30th with Microsoft Azure.

In a major outage, a multi-cloud approach also offers a competitive point of difference at a crucial time for customers impacted by the disruption. When outages last multiple hours or even days, customers of affected companies will often turn to unaffected competitors; we saw this during the CrowdStrike disruption when airline passengers switched to carriers that weren’t as impacted by the downtime.

Finally, a multi-cloud approach offers SMEs greater flexibility after an outage. Should the IT team consider moving workloads to more reliable cloud environments, a multi-cloud setup puts them several steps ahead, as they will already have those environments spun up or simply on standby. SMEs who put their eggs in one basket will find it more challenging to make a business-critical shift if their providers have not one but repeated outages, as we saw with Azure in July.

Three tips for going multi-cloud

For SMEs deciding to diversify their cloud portfolio, there are three core tips to remember.
First, while the best time to go multi-cloud may have been yesterday, the second-best time is now. Outages can hit any time, and as the events of July showed us, their impacts can be vast and long-lasting. SME IT teams should move swiftly once they decide to switch to or improve their multi-cloud approach to reap the benefits as soon as possible.

As they make these changes, SMEs should also remember that their multi-cloud strategy can be a hybrid cloud strategy with a mix of public and private platforms. Going hybrid can bring resiliency benefits and improved cost, performance, and scalability.

Above all, SMEs should remember that any cloud strategy does not have to be a solo project. They should consider relying on managed cloud providers who can offer expertise to get their deployments up and running quickly, reliably and securely.

Lessons learned

July was a difficult month in business IT, but as any experienced tech leader will tell you, such events offer significant opportunities to improve and strengthen for the future. The Microsoft Azure outages of the past month should motivate SMEs and larger companies' IT teams to adopt a best-in-class multi-cloud strategy and rethink their recovery options for greater business resiliency.

Image credit: peshkov/depositphotos.com

Jake Madders is co-founder and director of Hyve Managed Hosting