A Google Cloud outage shows the hidden suppliers your business depends on
On October 20, a power event in Googlee Cloud's London region took down services at Lloyds Bank, Halifax, HSBC and Revolut. Some Revolut customers could not pay by card, withdraw cash or exchange currency. Nothing in the Revolut app tells you it runs on Google Cloud.
Your business has the same hidden layers. The card terminal depends on a processor, which depends on a fraud check, which runs in someone's data centre. You signed with the first name in each chain and with none of the others.
A distributor stopped shipping because a $19-a-month label-printing subscription lapsed when the card on file expired. Packed orders missed the carrier pickup, and upgrading the late deliveries cost $1,200.
The reflex after a day like that is to buy a backup of everything. Price the hour first. A $10M distributor open 2,000 hours a year takes in about $5,000 for each hour it is open. Whether a $40,000-a-year backup is worth it depends on how often suppliers actually fail you and how much of that money is lost rather than delayed.
Then try this. Write down the five things the business cannot stop doing: taking payments, shipping orders, checking guests in. For each one, ask:
→ Which outside systems must work for this to happen?
→ What happens if one is gone for an hour? For a day?
→ Can staff keep going by hand and catch up later?
→ Has anyone actually tried that?
A useful answer from your team or vendor says what keeps working, what stops, for how long, and when someone last tested it. "We're on a major cloud provider" is reassurance. It does not tell you what your staff do at 7 a.m. when the screen goes blank.
Any activity where you cannot name the supplier it depends on is the first thing to find out.