20-21 May 2027
Bombay Exhibition Centre, Mumbai
The recent Microsoft 365 global outage has brought an important question to the forefront: how prepared are businesses when the technology they depend on every day suddenly becomes unavailable?
With Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and other critical services experiencing disruption, organisations were reminded just how deeply interconnected their operations have become with a handful of technology platforms. While the incident was not attributed to a cyberattack, its implications extended well beyond IT downtime, raising concerns around cybersecurity visibility, cloud concentration, third-party dependencies, business continuity and organisational resilience.
For technology and security leaders, the outage was more than a service disruption. It was a real-world stress test of business preparedness and the ability to maintain critical operations when essential systems fail.
We reached out to industry leaders and cybersecurity experts to understand the lessons organisations should take away from this incident, the vulnerabilities it has brought to light and what businesses must do differently to prepare for the next disruption. Their perspectives highlight a common message: resilience is not about preventing every failure; it is about ensuring that no single failure brings your business to a standstill.
Some excerpts:
Aditya Verma, Cisco
“Yesterday’s Outlook outage wasn’t possibly a cyberattack, but it still matters for security. When email and security dashboards go down, two things happen. Defenders lose visibility, and attackers get a perfect excuse. Expect a wave of ‘restore your mailbox’ phishing over the next few days.
My advice: tell your people that IT will never ask for their password to fix an outage. Once services are back, do a quick threat hunt for anything that slipped through.
Resilience isn’t just about keeping systems up. It’s about staying alert when they’re down.
Reetwika Banerjee M., Managing Director, Fly High Group (FHCC)
“The November 2026 global outage affecting Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot is more than an IT disruption; it is a boardroom wake-up call. The impact extends beyond technology to revenue, customer commitments, operational continuity, regulatory obligations and organisational trust—even without a cyberattack.
Three lessons stand out: cloud concentration is a strategic risk, data availability is as critical as data protection, and security governance must survive infrastructure failures.
Boards must look beyond vendor SLAs and ask: Can our business operate, protect critical data and maintain security oversight when our primary cloud ecosystem fails?
My call to CEOs, Boards, CIOs and CISOs: Put cloud resilience on the boardroom agenda. Reassess systemic technology dependencies, demand independently validated recovery capabilities, establish measurable resilience KPIs, and personally challenge-test your organisation’s ability to withstand a prolonged digital disruption. Do not wait for the next outage to discover your weakest link.
Technology can be outsourced. Business resilience and accountability cannot.”
Dr. Lalit Gupta, “The Cyber Doctor”, President, Cyber Security Council for India
“On 12 November, offices around the world found out how much of their day depends on one provider. Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot went down for millions of people, and more than 15 hours later things still weren’t fully back. In India the trouble peaked close to midnight, just as teams were handing work over to colleagues in other time zones.
What bothered me most wasn’t the missing email. Defender, Intune and the admin consoles went down too. So the people whose job is to watch over an organisation were locked out of their own tools at exactly the wrong moment. Microsoft says this was not a cyberattack, and I take them at their word until the full report comes out. But criminals don’t need to cause an outage to make money from one. When people are confused and frustrated, a fake “your mailbox has been restored, log in here” email works very well. If you haven’t already warned your staff, please do it today.
There’s a bigger lesson here, and it isn’t about Microsoft alone. Over the years we’ve put email, identity, collaboration, security and now AI into one basket because it’s convenient and cost effective. That’s a fair business choice, but it needs to be a conscious one. Boards should be asking simple questions. Which of our critical work stops if this provider goes down? How long can we keep going? Do we have a way to reach our people that doesn’t depend on the same platform? And have we ever actually tested that?
Most continuity plans I review are written around ransomware or a fire in the data centre. Very few assume that the cloud itself might go quiet for a day. That gap has to close.
The cloud has done wonders for us, and I’m not suggesting anyone walk away from it. I’m only saying that trust has to be backed by preparation. In my world we say resilience isn’t about never falling sick. It’s about staying on your feet while you recover.”
Vaibhav Pulekar, AVP CYBERSECURITY, TÜV SÜD
Perhaps when you read this, half your day was spent answering one question from the board: “Are we being hacked?”
Once you’ve confirmed it’s an upstream vendor outage and not a breach, the real advisory work begins. Today is a live stress test of our third-party and cloud concentration risks across the region.
A quick takeaway for security leaders: don’t waste a good outage. Use today’s disruption to have an honest conversation with executive leadership about what “acceptable downtime” actually looks like when a hyperscaler hiccups—and whether your fallback communication channels are truly independent of your primary identity provider.
If your backup plan relies on the same SSO that just went down, it’s not a backup plan.
Nishant Singh, COO, Gramax
“A resilient organisation is not one that never experiences technology failures. It is one that never allows a technology failure to become a business failure.”
Shyamkumar, Chief Regional Security Officer, Mastercard
“Today’s Microsoft global outage is a reminder that no technology platform, however big or reliable, is completely immune to failure.
For those of us in technology, especially in payments, banking and financial services, there are some simple lessons to take away:
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Too much dependence on a single technology provider can become a big risk.
Having backup systems on paper is not enough. They need to be tested and ready to use.
Security teams must be able to monitor, detect and respond even when key platforms are down.
We need to look beyond our direct vendors and understand their dependencies too. Business continuity is not just an IT responsibility. It involves the entire organisation.
My takeaway: Outages will happen. That’s part of technology. What matters is how prepared we are and how quickly we can adapt.
It’s time to put continuity ahead of convenience and design for survival, not just scale.
After all, the real test is not how reliable our technology providers are, but whether our businesses can keep running when their services go down.”
BFSI CyberSec Leader
“Technology, much like the human body, is bound to experience occasional failures. We cannot expect either to function perfectly all the time.
What matters is not just the failure, but its impact and how prepared we are to deal with it.
Humanity has overcome countless challenges through foresight, contingency planning, succession planning and the ability to adapt when things go wrong. Technology should be no different.
The recent technology outage is another reminder that Plan B is not optional. Organisations must think through worst-case scenarios, build resilience and regularly test their ability to continue operations when critical systems become unavailable.
Ultimately, resilience is not about ensuring nothing ever goes wrong. It is about ensuring that when something does, the impact remains manageable and recovery is possible.”
Shankar Jayaraman, Co-founder, CISO Genie
“With the rise of vibe coding and AI-driven development, we should expect more frequent outages, vulnerabilities and unexpected incidents. The question is not whether something will fail, but how prepared we are when it does. A well-tested incident playbook, accessible even when your primary systems are down, is no longer optional.”
— Shankar Jayaraman, Co-founder, CISO Genie
Upendra Upadhyay, Director, Analytics, MyGov India (MeitY)
“Honestly, I don’t see this Microsoft outage as a reason to panic, but it is definitely a massive wake-up call for all of us.
Living in a tech-driven economy is amazing, but we have to accept a simple truth: technology can, and eventually will, face errors that can lead to measurable and tangible failures. And since we are the ones who built it, a solid human backup needs to be our ultimate safety net.
Don’t get me wrong, the online meme fest and all the clever moment marketing were a genuinely fun break from the daily grind! But jokes aside, if a titan like Microsoft can experience a glitch this huge, think about the vulnerability of smaller companies. It shows that we need backups for our backups, and then backups for those.
How do we actually achieve that? That’s a conversation we all need to have together as an industry. The entire globe runs on this tech now, we just saw everything from airlines being grounded to hospitals struggling to function. It proves that blindly chasing full automation is a trap.
What we really need is human-led automation.
There always has to be a human face keeping things alive. If a person is missing, the machine can keep things running. But when the machine inevitably needs to take a rest, we humans have to be ready and capable of stepping right back in to keep the wheels turning.”
— Upendra Upadhyay, Director, Analytics, MyGov India (MeitY)