As leading outsourced IT professionals in London, we’ve had more than our fair share of companies coming to us in a panic after their third-party cloud software crashes.
So, to help you prevent a system failure, we thought it would be a good idea to publish a blog with some useful IT tips so you can take proactive action.
This is how our outsourced IT professionals in London mitigate the risk of system failures caused by third-party cloud vendors. We recommend that you do too.
Diversify and Design for Redundancy
The first principle of mitigating IT downtime is: don’t put all your eggs in one data centre — or even one cloud.
Multi-region and multi-cloud architectures reduce dependency on a single vendor’s infrastructure. For mission-critical systems, consider active-active deployments across cloud regions or providers, with automatic failover mechanisms.
Run Independent Stress Testing and Simulation Drills
Where multi-cloud isn’t feasible, take advantage of outsourced IT professionals in London with experience in “chaos engineering” exercises — intentionally disrupting systems or simulating vendor outages to observe how infrastructure and recovery protocols respond under pressure.
This proactive testing helps identify hidden dependencies and weak failover configurations long before they cause real issues. By validating system resilience in controlled conditions, our outsourced specialists fine-tune recovery times, improve vendor responsiveness, and strengthen overall uptime assurance.
Monitor and Audit Continuously
Vendor risk management isn’t a “set and forget” process. Continuous monitoring is key. Establish real-time visibility into vendor performance and availability via APIs, 24/7 monitoring, or third-party observability platforms.
Set up alerting thresholds and regularly audit your vendor ecosystem to flag underperforming or non-compliant partners. Visibility enables faster decision-making during incidents — and builds evidence for internal governance or insurance claims.
Contract for Accountability
SLAs with third-party vendors are only as strong as the clauses behind them. Negotiate clear terms for uptime guarantees, penalties for breaches, and transparent reporting on incidents.
Also include requirements for incident response collaboration, ensuring you get timely updates during outages.
Additionally, embed exit and transition clauses that allow you to migrate away from a vendor that repeatedly fails to meet obligations — without excessive lock-in or data migration friction.
Build for Graceful Degradation
Even the best cloud providers fail sometimes. Microsoft suffered major outages in March, July and October this year.
Subsequently, a mature IT strategy assumes outages will happen. Your IT network should be designed for systems to fail gracefully rather than catastrophically.
That might mean:
- Local caching to preserve user experience during temporary outages.
- Queue-based processing to resume operations once a service recovers.
- Communication plans that keep customers informed and confident during downtime.
Test and Evolve Your Risk Response
Finally, incorporate third-party failures into your disaster recovery and business continuity testing and calculate the cost of IT downtime.
Run tabletop exercises simulating cloud outages or vendor API failures. This builds organisational readiness and helps refine escalation protocols.
Outsourced IT Professionals in London
The cloud has changed the way businesses operate — but our outsourced IT professionals in London have been working with third-party vendors like Microsoft 365 since cloud computing was launched.
What we have learned is that true resilience isn’t just about choosing the right providers; it’s about designing systems and strategies that stay operational even when third-party software falters.
Do you want to know how we can help your business prevent an IT outage? Speak with one of our senior IT support professionals in London today.