The Microsoft outage is part of a growing trend. This is how to prepare for further disruption

Detailed summary

A Microsoft outage is disrupting work for people around the world but some businesses are better prepared than others.

Today's Microsoft outage has highlighted the risks of relying on cloud-based communications and Australians should be expecting more disruptions in the future, one expert says.

RMIT Associate Professor of engineering Mark Gregory says companies are not applying best practice in their processes.

"If we look at the outages that have occurred with Optus and Telstra, and also Vodafone, in some way they've all related back to a reduction in the amount of funds being put into the engineering side of the business," he said.

"So that when equipment goes down, or it's misconfigured, you then end up with a catastrophic outcome."

A major Telstra mobile outage in July that sparked chaos, with Triple Zero calls and businesses affected, was linked to the failure to maintain ageing equipment.

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Gregory said engineering processes developed over hundreds of years generally follow a path of testing, checking with small groups, small pilot platforms and testing again before changes are rolled out.

"But that process is often either not used, or it's shortened because of the timelines that companies place on their engineering teams."

The Microsoft outage on Friday disrupted the use of popular programs such as Outlook and impacted the Australian Federal Police and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

Opening of the article, excerpted from SBS News. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.