In October, a significant outage at the AWS US East 1 region had far-reaching implications, disrupting not just cloud workloads but also affecting a variety of services including Atlassian tools, home monitoring systems, communication platforms, and school websites. Notably, these service interruptions were not the result of a cyber attack nor indicative of inadequate backup systems; instead, they highlighted the challenges posed by unseen dependencies in today’s digital infrastructure that organizations heavily rely on.
The incident has prompted CIOs to confront the pressing question of how to effectively prepare for disruptions that exist outside their direct infrastructure yet can cause similar operational and reputational damage as security breaches. This concern was especially salient for Yogs Jayaprakasam, the chief information, technology, and digital officer at Deluxe, a company with a longstanding history in business payments and financial technology services. In light of the AWS outage, Jayaprakasam reflected on his observations regarding the growing frequency of cloud outages, noting that over the past year, there have been more than a dozen instances of public cloud outages across the major hyperscalers, each lasting six hours or longer.
The implications of these outages serve as a wake-up call for organizations to reevaluate their dependency on cloud services and consider the unforeseen vulnerabilities that can emerge from such reliance. Ultimately, while these challenges are complex, they could foster a more resilient approach to IT infrastructure management, prompting organizations to enhance their contingency planning and response strategies to mitigate the impacts of similar incidents in the future.