Date Published March 31, 2025 - Last Updated March 31, 2025
In Netflix’s miniseries Zero Day, a massive cyberattack throws the entire country into chaos. The series is fiction, but its premise taps into a very real fear: the moment systems fail, everything stops.
But in reality, IT disruptions don’t just impact infrastructure; they disrupt people. When authentication fails, employees can’t log in. When collaboration tools go dark, teams can’t communicate. When IT is scrambling to restore services, executives are demanding answers, customers are growing impatient and frontline workers are left in the dark.
The Microsoft outage in early 2024 proved just how fragile today’s IT environments can be. A single misconfigured update to Azure Active Directory locked businesses out of their Microsoft 365 environments for hours. Employees were stranded without access to email, documents and business-critical applications. IT teams couldn’t communicate with leadership or provide timely updates. The issue was eventually resolved, but not before businesses lost valuable time and money.
Disruptions like this are becoming more frequent and more severe. They aren’t just about technology failing; they’re about people being unable to do their jobs. Traditional business continuity planning focuses too much on restoring systems and not enough on keeping people productive during disruptions.
Why Traditional Continuity Plans Fall Short
For years, IT continuity planning has focused on how fast systems can be recovered after an incident. Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) have been the benchmarks for success. But what happens while systems are being restored?
The assumption has been that failures will be rare and quickly fixed, but the reality is more complex. Many disruptions today aren’t total system failures, but partial outages that impact productivity in unpredictable ways.
According to the 2025 Allianz Risk Barometer, 38% of businesses indicate cyber incidents (crime, IT network and service disruption) as the No. 1 risk. These aren’t always headline-making failures. Sometimes, it’s authentication services going down, APIs breaking due to vendor updates or a cloud provider experiencing regional instability. Each of these disrupts operations, creates IT bottlenecks and forces teams into reactive decision-making.
The Hidden Risk of Vendor Lock-In
Many organizations have embraced single-vendor IT ecosystems for simplicity and cost efficiency. Managing everything through one provider makes licensing, security and integration easier. However, as the Microsoft outage showed, it also creates a single point of failure.
When an organization relies entirely on one cloud provider for authentication, communication and collaboration, an outage in any part of that ecosystem cascades across the entire business. Employees can’t log in, IT teams can’t access service management tools and recovery efforts stall.
Some organizations were able to switch to alternative platforms during the Microsoft outage, using a separate authentication provider or backup communication channels. These businesses didn’t escape the outage, but they controlled the impact, ensuring employees could continue working (without having to rely on shadow-IT solutions) even while primary systems were being restored.
This is why many IT leaders are rethinking their approach. A disaster recovery plan may be a foundational part of your business continuity strategy, but structuring IT systems in a way that ensures no single failure brings everything to a halt is even more important.
Business Continuity Is About People
During the Microsoft outage, many employees were left in the dark. Without access to email or collaboration tools, they didn’t know what was happening or when systems would be restored. IT teams were working hard behind the scenes, but without clear communication channels, the frustration built quickly.
This gap in continuity planning happens often. Most business continuity strategies focus on technology recovery, but don’t always account for workforce readiness. Employees need to know where to get updates, which alternative tools to use and how to continue their work when primary systems are down.
This is particularly important for frontline employees in industries like manufacturing, healthcare and retail. Many continuity plans assume workers can check email for updates or access a corporate intranet, but those aren’t useful options for frontline teams who rely on different workflows.
Ensuring that employees at every level of the organization have the right communication channels and workflows in place can make the difference between a minor disruption and a major productivity loss.
How to Build a More Resilient Future
Fictional cyberattacks like those in Zero Day make for thrilling entertainment, but IT leaders don’t need a Hollywood-level crisis to experience massive disruption. The reality is that common IT failures, from cloud outages to software misconfigurations, are hitting harder and more often.
Business continuity is not just an IT problem. It is a people problem. The best continuity plans focus on how fast systems recover, but more importantly, they ensure that employees know exactly what to do when disruptions happen, minimizing downtime and confusion.
Organizations that take a proactive, built-in approach to continuity planning by reducing single points of failure, ensuring workforce readiness and continuously refining their strategies, will be the ones that stay ahead of disruptions, no matter where they come from.
IT leaders who design resilient, people-first continuity strategies won’t just recover faster when something breaks. They will ensure that business never stops in the first place.