12/19/2025
Table of ContentsIn 2025 alone, the myth of “always-on” cloud reliability was shattered. Major cloud infrastructure providers experienced multiple wide-scale outages that disrupted global operations.
- Cloudflare – which supports roughly 20% of global web traffic – suffered disruptions on Nov. 18, 2025 and again on Dec. 5, 2025, that caused platforms like X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Canva, and LinkedIn, to go offline worldwide.
- AWS’s US-East-1 region went dark on Oct. 20, 2025 triggering DNS failures across more than 70 services.
- On Oct. 29, 2025, Microsoft Azure endured an eight-hour outage due to a configuration error in Azure Front Door, impacting Microsoft 365, Teams, and even Xbox services.
For organizations whose operations, collaboration, compliance, or productivity depend on these platforms, such failures don’t just mean downtime — they result in lost revenue, reputational damage, and operational paralysis.
This blog explores three practical strategies organizations should adopt now to build resilience against cloud outages even when using cloud-native platforms. We’ll show how multicloud strategies, robust backup and recovery, and strict access oversight can safeguard collaboration environments.
Build Cloud‑Outage Resilience: Three Practical Strategies You Can Deploy Now
Cloud downtime doesn’t have to derail operations. The three strategies below show how to diversify providers, maintain independent backups, and tighten governance so collaboration stays available — even when core platforms stumble.
Strategy 1: Distribute Workloads Across Multiple Cloud Platforms to Eliminate Single-Provider Risk
Challenge: Many organizations rely heavily on a single cloud provider or content delivery network (CDN), creating a single point of failure. When that provider experiences an outage – whether due to configuration error, infrastructure failure, or unexpected bug – everything dependent on it goes dark. The 2025 Cloudflare outages are a case in point, where a global outage affected thousands of websites and disrupted services worldwide.
Solution and Implementation: Adopt a multicloud strategy. Distribute workloads, data, and critical services across at least two cloud providers or CDNs. Ensure redundancy at the DNS, CDN, storage, and compute levels, so that if one provider fails, traffic and service can failover to the alternative provider without user disruption. Regularly test failover procedures during non-peak hours; maintain up-to-date documentation and runbook for switching providers swiftly.
A multicloud strategy is a strong foundation, but to implement it smoothly for collaboration platforms and data, you need a vendor that supports multiple clouds and hybrid environments. AvePoint Cloud Backup can help you manage and protect data across different environments such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce — reducing risk when a single provider fails.
Strategy 2: Maintain Independent Backups to Ensure Rapid Recovery During Outages
Challenge: Even when a cloud platform recovers from an outage, data loss or data unavailability during the outage window can have lasting consequences — from lost work to compliance and audit issues, and operational delays. Many cloud-native users rely on provider-native replication, which may not be enough when the outage affects the control-plane, metadata-services, or cross-regional replication.
Solution and Implementation: Implement a comprehensive backup regime that is independent of the primary cloud provider — including regular snapshots of critical content, metadata, user permissions, and configuration. Store those backups in a separate cloud provider, or even in hybrid on-prem/off-cloud storage for further insulation. Automate backups, define retention policies aligned with regulatory and business needs, and conduct periodic restore drills to verify backup integrity.
This is precisely where AvePoint shines — using solutions like AvePoint Cloud Backup allows organizations to maintain independent, secure, cross-cloud backups of collaboration data. For faster recovery, the AvePoint Confidence Platform’s Cloud Backup Express feature can restore your Microsoft 365 data up to 20 times faster than traditional cloud backups — dramatically reducing downtime and enabling your team to get back to work without delay.
Strategy 3: Enforce Strict Access Governance and Configuration Oversight to Reduce Outage-Related Exposure
Challenge: Cloud outages often arise not only from infrastructure failures but also from misconfigurations, software defects, or changed permissions that cause cascading failures. Over-reliance on a provider reduces flexibility; native admin consoles may recover slowly or mask underlying issues. Without oversight, organizations may not detect that changes have introduced risk until it's too late.
Solution and Implementation: Establish governance policies that control who can change configurations, deploy code, or modify content permissions. Maintain an audit trail of all changes, enforce change-approval workflows, and segregate duties. Combine that with periodic reviews of content access rights, configuration baselines, and anomaly detection of risky behavior. For collaborative platforms, enforce least-privilege access to content, review external sharing settings, and ensure compliance with internal and regulatory standards.
Integrating AI-driven governance and insight tools — such as those detailed in our comprehensive guide on Gemini AI security in Google Workspace can help you maintain visibility and control. With AvePoint, you get more than backup: you gain oversight, compliance, and governance — reducing risk of misconfiguration during or after outages.
For organizations using other collaboration platforms like Microsoft 365 or other cloud platforms, our free eBook 4 Data Governance Best Practices for AI Success offers practical guidance to strengthen your data governance approach for resilient, trustworthy AI.
Future-Proofing Your Data Starts with Proactive Governance
Cloud outages will remain a recurring risk — whether caused by infrastructure flaws, configuration mistakes, or unprecedented demand spikes. But with a multicloud posture, robust backup and recovery mechanisms, and strict oversight over configuration and access, organizations can turn those risks into manageable contingencies. By investing in resilience today, IT leaders ensure business continuity, safeguard data integrity, and protect reputation — even when core providers falter. Start by auditing your cloud dependencies, backup posture, and governance practices.
Ready to secure your cloud collaboration no matter the provider? Strengthen resilience with AvePoint Cloud Backup for independent, cross‑cloud backups and rapid restores that keep teams working through outages.
