It must be 15–20 years now that Mimecast has been offering a protective layer around email services like Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365. Even today, you can see companies that are still able to keep their email running during Microsoft outages because they have Mimecast's email continuity service in place. It shows the value of having that extra layer of resilience.

If the downtime persists for more than 72 hours some will switch as they need to conduct their business , whether its email/github etc. However as long as the outages are more like a snowday very few of the big orgs will have the inclination to get back into the business of self-hosting for accountability/price/biz inertia reasons.

A week long outage though , yeah at that point the decisions becomes a nobrainer and not even network effects will prevent the migration.

Regular businesses sure, but governments, public and essential services should have different criteria imo and should rethink their reliance on these services.

Having an outage, fixing it, and then not having outages in the future, may be a positive signal compared to no outage ever, because you assume it will happen and the recovery time and process is unknown.

> switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical

Switching to what though? It's not like we didn't have outages before SaaS. It just happened at different times throughout the year in stead of all having an outage at the same time.

I feel like the big difference right now is that management can't call the EoD for progress updates every 10 minutes, they just have to assume that someone at Microsoft is working on fixing the issue.

When we self hosted, we very rarely had an unplanned outage. It really shouldn’t happen all the time. Plus I could work planned outages around the company’s schedule.

Now it feels like something is always down.

That's all predicated on having a team of people with the appropriate knowledge of how to securely self host an email system. Some organisations aren't big enough for that to be worthwhile, others have decided to forego that cost to let the cloud providers pick it up.

Email is not a particularly easy thing to reliably host and secure for a sizable organisation, especially if its not your main focus.

That's true, but it's more true for some companies than others. A lot of big companies cross time zones.

I suppose "unplanned outage minutes" would be a better metric. I still expect most companies to be worse on that metric. Most companies are just bad at running services reliably, especially when it's not their core business.

SMTP is a protocol designed back when machines might connect once a day to exchange email. It was designed to work during intermittent connectivity, queue messages, and recover gracefully. We instead decided we like instant rather than reliable by putting all our emails in one basket and then forgot that it doesn't have to be that way.

Beat me to it. But not before the National Email Resilience Review Committee is formed first, chaired by Lord Stoate Coate, announced with great fanfare. Obviously separate from the 1300 existing general cyber resilience review committees. Now then, very well, chaps and what have you, carry on, yees? (rolling Rs necessarily).

Not nearly as much pain as those who stand to benefit from outsourcing mail services would like you to believe.

Paying employees -> bad. Paying corporations -> good.

As if this isn't solvable with automation.