28 February 2025
Jonathan Dedman, Director, Cloudhouse
Back in November, British Airways planes were stuck on the tarmac after an IT outage left pilots needing to manually call the operations centre, rather than sending flight plans electronically. Commenting on the issue, a BA spokesperson said the company has “made significant investment in our IT infrastructure, putting in £750 million to replace legacy systems to help prevent outages and recover more quickly when they do occur, which is exactly what happened here.”
However, after several high-profile outages in recent months, it’s clear that large investments in modernising aging IT systems do not solve all issues. Digital transformation projects need to be joined by strategies that can instill ongoing operational resilience to prevent or quickly deal with outages that may occur. Crucially, enterprises must have a long-term strategy that can adapt to evolving changes, rather than implementing quick ‘workarounds’ to try and create change.
Modernisation alone won’t stop outages
Messaging used by tech providers can centre on the vital need to modernise your legacy IT infrastructure and, specifically, to migrate old applications/systems onto the cloud. By doing this, you will secure yourself against outages and protect yourself from cyberattacks. And the vast outlay of money firms say they pour into modernisation and digital transformation projects seems to say, “we have taken the steps needed to deal with these events.”
Yet modernisation doesn't eliminate outages by itself. Often, for example, companies are beholden to the cloud providers they use. So, if they migrate to a cloud provider that then encounters its own outage, and they don’t have mitigating plans in place to deal with such an occurrence, they can be helpless. Moreover, downtime can result from many other factors like poor integration, human error, or inadequate testing.
Last summer, we saw how an update gone wrong – by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike – caused a global outage for some of Microsoft’s services and products, including Microsoft Azure, its cloud computing platform. While companies affected by the outage could do nothing about this event, it illustrated the growing need to instill operational resilience in a company's IT infrastructure – and why modernisation isn’t always the solution.
The need for operational resilience in modern IT landscapes
The number of cloud software outages and cyberattacks are on the rise. Reasons for this range from a growing reliance by companies on cloud infrastructure and vendors to a more complex internet landscape with varying regulations and more sophisticated bad actors. Such a broad range of vulnerabilities has only increased the need for operational resilience to ensure system reliability.
Conducting robust risk assessments is key to the success of any digital transformation or change management process and ensuring operational resilience. But companies can often be so driven to implement changes in any form that they don’t properly set out goals for the project, failing to adequately assess risks, monitor these risks and outline the best ways to meet project and budget timelines while minimising disruption. Crucially, they spend vast amounts of money without actually creating genuine change and embedding processes to mitigate outages.
Adopting an adaptable, long-term approach
Change management can be a time-consuming and arduous process, as it requires planning for the many risks involved in a project. This means companies can form quick ‘workarounds’ to skip steps and accelerate the process. Such a focus on quick fix solutions often leads to recurring issues like more outages and higher maintenance costs.
Instead, IT strategies should emphasise adaptability, enabling systems to evolve with changing demands. Long-term planning ensures investments in infrastructure and processes will create sustainable, future-ready systems rather than temporary patches. This can take place by pivoting to a change enablement approach, where companies evaluate factors like the risks involved in the change, the criticality of the systems affected, and the potential impact on stakeholders to make the entire change process more streamlined and efficient.
What companies don’t often realise is that aging systems can still maintain value. It is not the applications themselves that are the problem, but the legacy operating systems they run on and how they are maintained. With the right support, it’s possible to migrate old applications and systems, to escape legacy data centres to new on-premise infrastructure or into the cloud, without altering them or risking the value they provide to your business. This reduces risk and enhances operational resilience, keeping business-critical applications operating and stable while placing them in secure, managed environments.
Assess the need to modernise
Before embarking on a modernisation project, it’s worth assessing if the investment will provide value for money in enabling change and aiding operational resilience. What is the track record of the cloud provider, for example? Are there ways we can secure our systems without needing to completely overhaul or replace them? This can help identify and plan for the changes that are actually needed.
As British Airways discovered, modernisation projects don’t always turn out as expected. The rise in outages simply shows the need for building operational resilience and adopting change enablement strategies that emphasise adaptability and long-term planning. Modernisation is needed, but it’s not a panacea for IT shortcomings.
