The Cloud is Not Your Business Continuity Plan: Why 2026 is the Year of the “Plan B”

ZOI’s Danilo Kirschner offers commentary on why the cloud is not your business continuity plan and why 2026 is the year of the plan B. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

For the last decade, “moving to the cloud” was synonymous with resilience. We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, believing that massive hyperscalers are immune to failure. Business continuity (BC) measures were paramount—remember the DAT cassettes you brought to the secure off-site location every week?

Such concepts are often forgotten when migrating to the cloud.

“The cloud” will take care of it. That illusion is shattering.

The Wake-Up Call We Could Not Ignore

Recent events have exposed the massive concentration risk businesses have accepted. The October 2025 AWS outage wasn’t just a technical glitch; it was a cascading failure that halted businesses globally, costing an estimated $581 million. It proved that “large cloud platforms are not immune to downtime” and relying on a single vendor is incredibly risky.

Similarly, the July 2025 “ToolShell” vulnerability in on-premises SharePoint servers was a critical reminder of the threat to our core data. This vulnerability allowed attackers to completely take over servers, deploying ransomware and accessing entire file systems.

These events prove a simple truth: if your entire operation, including your BC plans, lives with one provider, you don’t have a BC plan. You just have a single point of failure.

The 2026 Imperative: Multi-Cloud Resilience

The “one cloud fits all” model is dead. The future of enterprise IT, and the key focus for 2026, will be mature multi-cloud strategies. This is no longer just for cost-optimization; it is a survival imperative. Market forecasts agree, with Gartner projecting 75% of organizations will adopt multi-cloud or hybrid strategies by 2026, driven by the need for resilience.

This new focus will include using a secondary provider, even if it’s just as a small emergency backup—a “cold” or “hot” standby environment to failover to when the primary provider has a problem.

It’s Always About the Data

At the end of the day, it’s always about the data. Any organization that thinks it can get away with a cluttered, inconsistent data pool should think twice—it’s no longer just a “data problem,” it’s a core business vulnerability. In a multi-cloud BC plan, data is the crown jewel, and it needs to be constantly synchronized. This doesn’t always mean a full, live mirror; it can be a “hot sync” of critical data or an asynchronous copy of essential contact lists and legal files.

The strategy depends on the threat. But the need for a separate, secure data store is absolute. Furthermore, this disciplined approach to data management serves double duty: a well-managed data pool is the fundamental prerequisite for successful and reliable AI adoption.

And What About the Everyday Tools?

The same is true for your office tools and collaboration. What happens when your primary collaboration suite goes down? We are already working with customers to build “standby” solutions with Google Workspace, creating a completely separate, resilient environment. This ensures that when—not if—the next problem hits their primary Microsoft environment, their critical users can keep communicating and operating.

The “set it and forget it” era of single-provider cloud computing is over. Recent hyperscaler outages and critical vulnerabilities have provided a stark wake-up call, proving that business continuity has been dangerously overlooked. In 2026, a multi-cloud standby strategy will become non-negotiable.