A note from our President and Chair
Yesterday, email stopped for a large part of the working world.
Today it is still coming back! What has this shown us?
Microsoft says it has found no evidence of a cyberattack, and the root cause is not yet confirmed. So this is not a post about blame. Every provider at this scale will have a day like this one. What matters is what the day showed us.
- Email is still mission critical. We talk about it as legacy. Yesterday said otherwise. Approvals, client commitments, supplier orders, password resets and sign-in codes all ride on it. When it stopped, so did a great deal of work nobody had labelled “email dependent.”
- AI is on the same path, only faster. Email took decades to become something we cannot work without. AI is getting there in a few years. Ask your teams: if our AI tools went dark for two days, which work stops, and who still knows how to do it without them?
- Single-vendor concentration is a trade-off we chose. One provider for mail, collaboration, files and identity is efficient and, done well, more secure. It also means one bad day can take all of them at once, including the channel you would use to tell people what is happening. Most of us should not unwind that. But we should be able to explain the trade-off to our boards in plain words, and show what we have done about it.
- Resilience is what you practiced, not what you bought. Can you reach every employee and your key clients without your primary platform? Can your administrators still sign in when identity is degraded? When did you last rehearse it?
- The team that handles this is broader than it used to be. IT teams have to be more diverse than ever. With more of what we run sitting with cloud and SaaS providers, the job shifts from operating technology to managing providers, risk and change. Add rising cyber attacks and the growth of AI, and the range keeps widening: security, data, architecture, vendor management and communication, alongside deep technical skill. Yesterday, none of us could fix the platform. Our work was communication, workarounds and judgment.
- Culture decides how the day goes. Skills get a team into the room. Culture determines what happens there. An engaged, dedicated team steps in before being asked, raises bad news early, and says “I don’t know yet” without fear. That trust is built on ordinary days, long before an outage. If your team carried you through yesterday, tell them so today.
- There is strength in numbers. On a day like yesterday, your peers are often the best source of help: what they are seeing, which workaround held, what they told their executives. Whether in your own industry or through a group like CIOCAN, shared knowledge leaves every one of us better prepared. Nobody has to work it out alone.
To the next generation of technology leaders: treat yesterday as a live case study. Read the post-incident report when it is published. Ask your team what you would have done. The leaders who stand out connect technology, risk and people, and stay clear-headed when the screen says “cannot connect.”
To my fellow Tech Leaders, CIOs and CISOs: what did yesterday teach you? This is the conversation CIOCAN exists for: peer to peer!
Derek Cullen, CIO.D®
President and Chair
CIO Association of Canada
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