Reasons to avoid a proprietary monoculture #3

A zdnet report on the Azure AD outage in mid march... Pretty ho-hum you might think... normal cloud/IT problems. The real issue with this which people don't seem to understand is that nearly all New Zealand Government public service agencies are in a headlong rush to run everything in Azure and as a result of this outage were unable to function... Couldn't log in, no Teams, no email, no documents, no calendar and of course, no contingency plan. A significant part of the New Zealand Government, dead in the water and relying on a single US multinational to get it going again.

There are Government regulations to ensure banks operating in NZ can continue to do so in the event of the overseas parent company failing so why don't the same regulations exist for Government itself? The continued abuse of the MCSSA by NZ Government agencies to avoid going out to market not only excludes New Zealand based businesses from competing on a level playing field but risks our very operation as a sovereign nation. It's not the first failure and it won't be the last... there is an outage of some sort every three to six months. Is this really what we want as a country?