When a major service outage happens right before a major holiday, some people take it as a sign that they should pack their bags and head home early.

However, today was not a carefree day for companies whose businesses rely on hosting a service on a cloud platform like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or for those who purchase hosted services to get their work done. An outage like the one many people experienced today can eat in to your bottom line with each passing minute.

During our onboarding security gap assessment many of our clients are surprised to hear us ask questions about any previously completed Business Impact Analysis documents they may have on file and what contingency plans have been assigned to products they use or provide that are hosted or “in the cloud.”

We ask these questions because for most companies, uptime is money. Whether you’re taken offline by a bad actor intentionally causing harm or a server connection failing, you need to understand how your business will be impacted during the outage and what workarounds you may need in place if there is enough profit or productivity loss to warrant it.

Check out this article from The Verge that lists some of the affected companies and contains additional info about the outage.  Don’t let this happen to you!  It’s imperative that you understand what your critical infrastructure relies on and what service-level agreements (SLAs) are in place to keep that infrastructure running so that you have a peace of mind.