The AWS disruption has raised concerns about the fragility of cloud computing, a global overreliance on centralised systems, and weak customer resilience.
Here’s what three experts say about preparing for future outages, and the lessons the world needs to learn…
Reduce overreliance on centralised systems
Professor Feng Li, associate dean for research and innovation at Bayes Business School, UCL, says: “Amazon Web Service’s outage is a timely reminder of how deeply our economies now depend on just a handful of cloud infrastructures.”
“The challenge is equally significant for users. Too many still treat the cloud as a single point of reliability rather than a shared-responsibility environment.”
Understand the risks
“What stands out here is the breadth of impact – from consumer apps to financial and public-sector services – suggesting many organisations still underestimate the level of concentration risk in today’s digital infrastructure,” says Li.
He adds governments and researchers will have to grapple with this key question: “What happens when critical digital infrastructure is so concentrated that a single regional failure can have global consequences?”
Decentralise and diversify infrastructure
“We need to diversify our technology infrastructure,” says Dr Aybars Tuncdogan, professor of digital innovation and information security at King’s College London.
He says customers can design other systems that come online when something goes wrong, or they can develop their own internal cloud infrastructure.
“Unless we rethink the architecture, we should expect more outages of this scale, whether from glitches or targeted attacks,” he says.
Benjamin Schilz, chief executive of communications tech firm Wire, says: “True resilience isn’t just about preparing for redundancy, it’s about maintaining control over your own data.
“That means ensuring organisations can continue to operate securely and independently, without being tied to one provider or platform.”