This past Monday, some Microsoft services including Outlook email services, O365, and Teams collaboration suite experienced a prolonged outage, lasting up to 6 hours in some cases. While the exact cause is still to be confirmed, Microsoft has cited “authentication issues” and “configuration change in the back end”. Users attempting to log into the system were unable to connect, while those already logged in did not experience the issues.
If you were impacted by this week’s outage, what was the cost of lost productivity for your employee base for 3+ hours? According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime is $5,600/minute, or $336,000/hour. So, you could say that on average this outage has cost businesses over $1M in lost productivity!
Diversification = risk mitigation
That said, unplanned outages do happen, making it important to take a risk mitigation approach. A solution like Entrust Identity as a Service would have enabled organizations impacted by the outage to retain access to their other services like the company VPN, Secure Shell, Salesforce, Zoom, and WebEx amongst others.
This year has taught us a lot about being prepared. Few businesses, let alone IT teams, could have anticipated this year’s new normal including the great migration to a remote workforce, an accelerated need for digital transformation, and an intensified threat landscape. Now more than ever it is clear that ensuring a secure and productive workforce is critical to continued business continuity.
At Entrust, our digital identity approach is rooted in a core focus on security, understanding that each organization has unique needs and priorities. This has driven us to offer many possible identity authenticators and approaches to meet varied business needs. This means we are ready to support you with best-in-class MFA, including credential-based access and passwordless solutions, no matter what the world throws at us next.
To learn more about our Identity as a Service solutions, visit https://www.entrust.com/digital-security/identity-access-management/products/identity-as-a-service.
