One of my earliest memories of the cloud is when it dawned on me that I was no longer in control. I’d spent the last 10 years managing on-premises infrastructure, and if something went wrong, I was pretty confident in our ability to fix things. After moving tens of thousands of mailboxes to the new Exchange Online service, then part of a service called Live@EDU, I experienced an outage where there was nothing I could do except wait for someone else to help.

Looking back on the outage, it was short and solved as quickly as I would have been able to if I had been managing our service. The pressure came from having my IT director perched on my shoulder, expecting me to do something and provide people a constant stream of information.