Yesterday’s Microsoft 365 Suite-wide outages, led to continual faults for Outlook on the web on Tuesday, June 6th. When the outages pile up, it becomes difficult to tell when one starts and the other ends. The latest: Can’t access Outlook on the web and other Microsoft services and features The prior day incidents began with EX571516: Some users are unable to access Outlook on the web, and may experience issues with other Exchange Online services.

On Monday morning, June 5th there was a wide scale outage for Microsoft 365. Interestingly, for this one, they first reported it with a barrage of duplicate health status emails (why, we have no idea) but the issue was much more widespread than that – it was affecting most Microsoft Office 365 services: The first incident was Incident EX571516: Some users are unable to access Outlook on the web, and may experience issues with other Exchange Online services.

You get what you pay for is a common axiom, one that even applies to infrastructure management solutions. Cloud vendors bundle Digital Experience Management (DEM) solutions with their services, seemingly at no extra charge. But such products lack the capabilities needed to understand how enterprise computing resources function. As a result, corporations do not make needed adjustments and lose time, revenue and increase user frustration.

An employee calls complaining about slow response time. Another one has similar trouble. No red lights are flashing on the Network Operations console, so the network is up and running. What is happening? Frankly, it could be just about anything: an overworked router, a runaway process on a laptop, a slow loading web page, or a bandwidth hog at home.

Before the pandemic, capturing your users’ experience was simple because just about everyone was in the office, and you had traditional on-premises systems in place. Nowadays, remote work and hybrid access and usage patterns are much more varied. Work hours, 24×7 availability, collaboration, networking, hybrid, etc. all lead to difficulties in understanding employee Digital Experience.

Here we go again. If 2022 wasn’t enough, there are new challenges in 2023 staring right at information technology leaders. As interest rates rise and consumer demand slows, companies plan to cut costs and do more with less. But what does all this mean for you? Amid this uncertainty, the IT operations department must adapt well to these changes. Because if they don’t, the business they support will be disadvantaged.