Lessons from Recent Outages: How Smart Enterprises Stay Ready

Unforeseen outages aren't a matter of if. They're a matter of when. The question is whether you're ready.

In the past few weeks, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Salesforce, all experienced significant disruptions, leaving work interrupted, revenue lost, and reputations tested. 

During the Salesforce disruption on September 16, an authentication infrastructure failure cascaded into a full platform outage, bringing down the CRM, APIs, and support portal and affecting hundreds of customer instances across six countries for nearly three hours. 

For IT teams managing incidents like this one, visibility is everything: knowing what’s wrong, where, and why, before users start calling the helpdesk. Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) gives IT teams exactly that: end-to-end visibility from user devices, across any network, to the apps they depend on.

ZDX detected a sharp decline in Salesforce Lightning experience scores and alerted IT teams. Network latency held steady throughout, which told teams exactly what they were dealing with: the problem wasn't the network. It was the application. Using the ZDX Agent, teams identified the root cause within minutes and had a specific next step, rather than just an alert that Salesforce was slow. Here’s what that looked like:

ZDX score trend showing VIP user experience on Salesforce Lightning drop from Good to Poor in the early hours of September 16.

ZDX probe data showing response times spiking to 9-11 seconds and synthetic scores dropping sharply during the September 16 outage window.

That data, captured in real time, tells you what's wrong before anyone has to ask. In the Salesforce example, the network was clean. The problem was upstream at the application layer. That diagnosis, the kind that used to take hours of manual investigation, took minutes. Observe, diagnose, act. That is the loop that separates resilient enterprises from reactive ones. ZDX isn't just useful during incidents. It's how enterprises maintain uptime confidence every day. That’s visibility. But what happens when the disruption hits your own security infrastructure?

Your Security Infrastructure Needs a Plan Too

Zscaler runs the world's largest inline security cloud, backed by a 99.999% industry-leading uptime SLA with built-in resilience for all common failure scenarios. That's not a footnote, it's the foundation. But, even the most resilient infrastructure doesn't eliminate the need for a plan.

Just like you plan for redundancy in your data centers with multiple ISPs, or for hyperscaler workloads with multi-region backups, your most critical security services need a DR and business continuity plan (BCP) too.

When disruptions hit, the instinct to route around security is understandable. It's also dangerous. Bad actors actively exploit these moments, knowing the safeguards are down.

This Is What a Real Continuity Plan Looks Like

When it comes to DR/BCP for the Zero Trust Exchange , organizations typically consider two approaches:

• Accept the risk. Do nothing. Hope it never happens, or ride it out if it does.
• Delegate the risk to Zscaler. Zscaler provides both the primary and an isolated backup cloud. That's exactly what Zscaler Business Continuity Cloud is built for.

In normal operations, all users, branches, and workloads transact securely through the Zero Trust Exchange. The Business Continuity Cloud sits fate-separated in the background, fully managed and ready — so when a critical failure hits, the infrastructure to respond is already in place.

Zscaler Business Continuity Cloud is a dedicated, per-customer read-only private cloud with an isolated data plane and control plane, completely independent of the primary Zscaler cloud, running in a last-known good state and continuously syncing policy. 

When the Zero Trust Exchange becomes unreachable, Zscaler Client Connector automatically reroutes to the backup cloud. 

• For your users, it's seamless: no manual intervention, no re-logins, no help desk tickets.
• For your security team, it's not a degraded fallback: same policies, same inspection engines, logs still streaming. Consistent Zero Trust posture maintained through the disruption. 
• For IT, deployment is a natural extension of your existing Zscaler environment with flexible deployment options: a Zscaler-managed service across 9+ global data centers , customer-hosted, or hybrid. Further, you can run fire drills in peacetime, so the first time you activate it isn't during an actual incident.

The Time to Build Your Continuity Plan Is Now

Many of Zscaler's largest global organizations have already adopted and deployed Business Continuity Cloud successfully. And for organizations subject to mandatory operational resilience regulations like DORA, CPS 230, or ISO 22301, Business Continuity Cloud is also a concrete, auditable step toward meeting mandatory resilience requirements, with serious financial penalties increasingly on the line.

Start with visibility. Build in continuity. ZDX and Zscaler Business Continuity Cloud give you both.