How advisors managed the Outlook outage
Even if he managed to largely avoid much hardship during the outage, Starratt says that there was a useful reminder for advisors and dealers about redundancy in their technology stacks.
“You better have a way that you can continue business. This [outage] was a pretty short one, but imagine if it went a few days,” Starratt says. “You would have to pick up the phone and talk to people again because we are so reliant on especially email. For a lot of businesses, not just investment, that’s their primary mode of communication now.”
Starratt adds that redundancies can extend beyond the digital realm. He suggests that advisors might want to consider using multiple phone service providers for their office lines and personal cell phones, for example, as a way to ensure they can always communicate if that side of the tech ecosystem is disrupted.
The outlook outage occurred amid some market volatility on Thursday as the stock of the world’s largest company by market capitalization, Nvidia, fell dramatically following the shock resignation of CEO Jensen Huang. Despite scary headlines that might spook some clients, Starratt says his capacity to reassure wasn’t impacted because.
“Our client base actually still remembers how to use a phone,” he says. “So anyone who knew what was going on could pick up the phone and call us.”
