A major AWS outage hit thousands of companies, but only those using the affected US-EAST-1 data center. This highlighted the risks of depending on a single cloud provider. IT leaders stress the need for redundancy—such as backups and failovers—to reduce the operational impact of outages, particularly for mission-critical systems. However, there are financial trade-offs: not every system needs full redundancy, and organizations must prioritize based on risk, sector, and potential impact. While using a single provider can be efficient and drive innovation, CIOs must still prepare for outages by architecting for failure within their provider’s ecosystem, auditing for high-impact dependencies, and ensuring they have strong contingency and recovery plans. Highly regulated or always-on industries require higher resilience, but in all cases, informed risk management is key.
