Single points of failure fail. The SaaS layer is not an exception

The disruption proved something IT professionals have relearned in every decade of their careers. Mark Twain observed that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. This is a verse we have heard before: Dependence on a single point of failure, without a tested contingency plan, is not a strategy — it is a risk that has simply not yet been called. Whether the failure comes from a cyberattack, a vendor outage, an infrastructure collapse or a cloud provider’s bad deployment, the result is the same. The institution stops. And no SLA, contract or compliance certification prevents that moment from arriving.

Vigilance is not optional. Technologies are evolving faster than any IT team can fully anticipate. New platforms, new integrations, new dependencies emerge constantly — and with each one comes a new potential failure point. That is not an argument against adopting new technology. It is an argument for the one principle that never becomes obsolete: Reliance on any single critical system, whether it is a connectivity provider, an identity platform or a SaaS solution, is a proven strategy for failure. The question is never whether that system will fail. The question is whether the institution is prepared when it does.

Single points of failure fail — inevitably, and at the worst possible time. IT professionals have known this for thirty years. The SaaS layer is not exempt.

This is not a new lesson. Azure has gone down. AWS has failed. Google Workspace has had outages that took organizations dark globally. No campus runs a single ISP connection — we provision redundant circuits, preferably from independent providers, because we learned long ago that the connection will sometimes fail and the institution cannot afford to stop when it does. Financial services, government and multinational enterprises applied that same logic to every dependency in their stack. Their response to platform risk was not to demand better SLAs. It was to architect around the dependency. Redundancy. Failover. Independent continuity capability. The massive disruptions from Canvas demonstrate that effective contingency solutions for these critical platforms have not kept pace with our dependence on them. We cannot get fooled again.