With Office 365 Offline For Some, It’s Time to Remember Who Has Control of Your Data

While today may be a Tuesday, Microsoft’s cloud is having a case of the Monday’s as reports from across the web are citing issues with accessing the company’s online services. And when you can’t access your data, it’s important to remember who has control of your valuable assets.

According to Microsoft’s Azure status page, the South Central US region is experiencing an outage impacting a significant number of services utilized from that location. You can view the Azure status page for the latest information on the outage but the company does say that there may be downstream issues because of the impact related to Azure Active Directory.

Users from around the globe are reporting issues as well, while Microsoft says this is only impacting the South Central US, it’s clear that the outage is having a wide impact. For those of you who are having issues with Office 365, that status page is completely offline and has been for a couple of hours.

Microsoft is aware of these issues and is working to resolve the problem but has not provided a timeline for service to return to normal operation.

When an outage like this occurs, it’s important to remember that when you are all-in with the cloud, you are not fully in control of your data when an outage occurs. Because of this, having a backup copy of your assets stored elsewhere is critical to making sure that your business remains flexible when a vendor’s service does go offline.

Even with today’s disruption, Microsoft’s cloud is still typically more reliable than your own data center. That being said, having a multi-cloud approach to your operations is the best way to making sure that when AWS or Azure tips over, your operations are not impacted.