Last week the world was reminded yet again of why Big Cloud needs to stay in its lane, and what happens when it doesn’t.

I’m talking, of course, about the refusal of the giant players to stay out of areas like managed server, network and ISP/CSP infrastructure. Big Cloud does it because they have capacity and they’re positioned to dominate the market – but not because they do it well, or even care to try.

The latest example was the two-day Microsoft 365 outage that impacted so many of us. It happens because Microsoft oversells its seemingly “unlimited” capacity – and then when the limits show themselves, Microsoft simply shrugs its collective corporate shoulders and says, “What are you going to do? We’re Microsoft.”

They’re right, in a sense. Once people become dependent on Microsoft for server management or network management, there’s little they can do besides wait it out when there’s an outage.

You can’t get on the phone with them and ask for help. That’s like calling Comcast and expecting prompt and personal service. Getting out the spiral notebook and doing your work in long form is less frustrating than that.

But they all do it. Microsoft is a software designer that insists on doing cloud. Amazon is a bookstore that insists on doing cloud. They’re big and they’re powerful and corporate IT directors figure they’ll never be criticized by their bosses for going with the established, safe choice.

Except that they’re not safe, because they only provide reliable service when it’s convenient for them to do so – and once it’s not, your only option is to wait.

This is so frustrating for those of us who know how to do this right.

UBX Cloud has excelled for years at so much of what prevents these incidents. We know how to design for real failure domains. We know how to isolate workloads into single tenant pods, so you’re protected from a problem that originates somewhere else – since we know what is likely to happen upstream.

And above all this, we answer the phone when you call us, and listen to you and answer your questions. And we act.

We had an incident just last week when a customer came to us with a challenging issue. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the solution was, but we knew we could find it and our team dug into it. We implemented short-term ameliorative steps so the client could continue operating, then the team went into mission mode and kept digging until we found the answer.

That’s our culture. It’s why we’re here.

We hire people who want to be that way with customers – and it’s even more important than their technical acumen.

You think you can get Microsoft on the phone and ask them to do that?

Look, we realize it doesn’t make sense for a lot of people to self-host when it comes to cloud. Not everyone is comfortable with the technical requirements that presents. I think they should be able to look to someone for help. But that someone should help.

Microsoft makes great software. But they should not be in the business of first-party managing it, because they consistently demonstrate that they don’t prioritize it and don’t even care that much if they do it well. You want a partner who does care. That’s why UBX Cloud is here.