What Cloudflare Outage Teaches Us About EA Resilience

After a recent Cloudflare outage, millions of users suddenly found the websites they rely on unreachable. In an instant, businesses felt the ripple effects — lost transactions, frustrated customers, and operational disruptions. Events like these are reminders that in the world of technology, unpredictability is the only constant. 

And this isn't an isolated occurrence. A similar situation occurred during the CrowdStrike disruption. The details may differ, yet the pattern is the same: external incidents appear without warning and organizations feel the impact long before they can influence the cause.

What they can influence is how far that impact goes. This is where Enterprise Architects make a significant difference. With a well-designed and adaptable enterprise architecture, they can ensure that critical processes, applications, and supporting components can withstand unexpected shocks.

In this blog post, we'll dive into how Enterprise Architects can safeguard your business, making it resilient, responsive, and ready for whatever challenges the future might bring. 

The first task for any Enterprise Architect preparing an organization for disruptions is to identify its core business processes. Ask yourself:

Which processes are absolutely essential and must continue under any circumstances? 

Take an airport for an example. Landings, ground handling and take-offs form the core of its service — they cannot pause. On the other hand, running airport shops, or parking charging can safely wait until operations stabilize. Every organization has a similar distinction between mission-critical processes and those that are more flexible. 

This prioritization lays the foundation for every resilience measure that follows. Enterprise Architects use these insights to connect business priorities to architectural requirements, ensuring that resilience efforts are focused where they will protect the most value or where disruptions would cause the greatest harm.

Hint: Learn more about business continuity management and how it ensures resilience in the face of challenges.

Once the critical processes are identified, Enterprise Architects take a closer look at what enables them to run. Every business process depends on a set of underlying layers across the enterprise, such as:

• applications and platforms 

• APIs, integrations, and databases 

• infrastructure components and external services 

• people, roles, and organizational structures 

• data flows, compliance constraints, and security controls 

Using process maps, system inventories, or dependency diagrams, EAs uncover relationships that often remain hidden in day-to-day operations. This uncovers the vulnerable areas, such as a single vendor supporting multiple high-impact processes or critical integrations that lack backup paths. 

This shifts the organization from reactive troubleshooting to proactive resilience engineering. Instead of waiting for a Cloudflare-scale outage, or similar external inconvenience to expose weaknesses, Enterprise Architects surface them early and guide teams toward mitigation strategies. 

The next step is to understand the impact of an interruption. At this point, Enterprise Architects need to ask a simple but decisive question:

"If something breaks, how bad will it be, and how long can we operate without it?"

Germany's BSI Business Impact Analysis provides the structure to answer this. Instead of relying on assumptions, it offers measurable insight into the real consequences of downtime.

Following the BIA framework, Enterprise Architects: 

1. Estimate the damage over time

For example: 

• thirty minutes of website downtime is inconvenient
• three hours affects sales and frustrates customers
• twenty four hours can lead to financial loss or reputational harm

This helps quantify how disruption impacts the business. 

2. Determine the Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTPD)

This is the point at which being offline causes unacceptable harm. It marks the limit the business cannot cross.

3. Define the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

How quickly must each application that the relevant process relies on be restored?

For example:  "All services for Landing Aircraft must be back within 15 minutes."

4. Align technical recovery targets with business needs

Enterprise Architects compare the RTO and RPO of applications with the MTPD of the related processes. This reveals gaps, for example:

• a process that can only be offline for one hour…
• …supported by an application that needs ten hours to recover

Such a gap is a serious risk and needs attention.

By working through these steps, Enterprise Architects gain a clear view of how disruptions affect the organization and where protective measures are most urgent. The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) turns resilience from a hope into a plan and from assumptions into clear, enforceable requirements.

Hint: Streamline your analysis process with our free BIA template.

Resilient architecture is created long before an outage occurs. Enterprise Architects design structures that can absorb failures, continue operating under pressure, and keep critical services available even when supporting components are affected. To achieve this, they introduce safeguards that provide alternative paths, temporary substitutes or reduced but stable service levels during unexpected interruptions.

Typical measures may include:

• multi-provider DNS and CDN configurations 

• redundant routing and failover paths 

• cloud-agnostic or multi-cloud deployments 

• static or cached fallback pages during outages 

• emergency "break-glass" access for critical teams 

• limited-functionality modes (e.g., read-only operation) 

These safeguards work effectively because Enterprise Architects prepare the conditions around them. They reveal single points of failure, design continuity patterns that guide system behavior under pressure and define how services should degrade in a controlled way to protect user trust. Through capabilities such as Application Portfolio Management and the integration of BPM and EA, much of the insight needed for these decisions is already in place.

Together, these measures give the organization room to manoeuvre during disruption. Instead of a sudden stop, services remain available in a reduced or alternative form until full restoration is possible. This reduces the impact of outages and keeps processes moving at the moments when stability matters most.

Hint: Download our free BCM checklist and self-assess your preparedness, verify key BCM tasks, and identify potential gaps in your continuity strategy

Outages happen, and organizations cannot prevent every external incident. What they can influence is how well they continue to operate when disruption reaches them. This is where Enterprise Architects make the difference. By clarifying what matters most, exposing hidden dependencies, defining recovery needs and shaping an architecture that can absorb interruptions, they turn resilience into something concrete and reliable.

Their work helps the organization stay steady when conditions change without warning. Essential activity continues, processes remain controlled and teams know what to expect. In an unpredictable digital world, the ability to remain stable and dependable during disruption becomes a defining strength.