Last year gave IT leaders a reminder: your resilience is only as strong as the providers you depend on.
Multiple major outages hit the headlines. In October, AWS disruption brought down banking services and smart beds alike. Then came the Cloudflare outage in November, which took platforms such as X and ChatGPT offline. These incidents have far-reaching consequences, stalling global services and sometimes costing billions.
So, what can businesses learn from these moments where critical shared infrastructure faltered? And more importantly, how can they strengthen operational resilience in 2026?
One outage can shake the internet
IT outages are becoming bigger and affecting more services than before.
Today’s IT systems are deeply interconnected, spanning hybrid, cloud, and multi-cloud infrastructure. An issue with a single provider can quickly ripple through payment systems, customer channels, internal tooling, and partner platforms — all at once.
The financial impact is well documented. The CrowdStrike outage of 2024 allegedly cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion. When Cloudflare went down in November, some brokers were estimated to have lost $1.6 billion in trading volume.
The uncomfortable truth is that many organizations only discover their weak spots during these kinds of incidents. Hidden dependencies, misconfigured failover paths, and single points of failure stay invisible until a shared service buckles — and by then, it’s often too late to avoid disruption.
For regulatory bodies, this presents a systemic risk.
Your cloud and SaaS dependencies face regulatory scrutiny
Recently, EU regulators published a list of 19 firms deemed “critical ICT providers” including AWS, Google, and Microsoft. Acknowledging these companies as systemically important highlights a growing concern around concentration risk. We rely on a handful of technology giants for the infrastructure underpinning global finance, healthcare, logistics, and communications. When one of them falters the impact is felt across industries and borders.
IT leaders are now accountable for mitigating this impact.
Regulators worldwide are heightening expectations for digital resilience, data integrity, and responsibility for third parties. In Europe, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is unambiguous on this point: operational resilience depends as much on understanding your wider digital ecosystem as on managing your own servers and applications.
Documenting vendor performance and maintaining robust dependency maps is now a regulatory expectation, not just best practice.
Stay ahead of your third-party IT issues
No technology is immune to an outage. The real differentiator for enterprises in 2026 and beyond will be how quickly they predict and detect issues, then how well they manage them. In regulated industries, this early detection is increasingly being supported by advances in agentic AI — not as a silver bullet, but as a set of practical tools that can:
- Spot anomalies early by analyzing patterns across logs, metrics, and events from multiple clouds and providers (even when individual signals look “normal”).
- Correlate symptoms into likely causes within minutes instead of hours, narrowing down which service, region, or vendor is the real source of an issue.
- Generate fast, usable root-cause explanations, giving teams a clear narrative of what happened, which dependencies were involved, and what to fix to prevent a repeat.
By moving from “eyes on glass” to “machines on glass”, enterprises can watch, interpret, and act on signals at machine speed, while humans focus on exception handling, strategy, and stakeholder communication.
As such, IT leaders can reduce downtime and mean time to resolution (MTTR) while showing regulators that impact tolerances and SLAs are being met even when third parties fail.
Shore up resilience in 2026
With clearer situational awareness and a faster path to recovery, enterprises can manage third-party shocks without derailing critical services and risking regulatory breaches.
As the financial and reputational stakes of downtime continue to rise, resilience is essential for any regulated enterprise that depends on cloud and SaaS to run its business.
For IT leaders, 2026 is a chance to strengthen their foundations, invest in smarter observability strategies, and take control of their operational resilience in the interconnected, multi-cloud era.
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