Last month’s outages at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure once again highlighted the vulnerability of organisations that rely on a single cloud platform. How should businesses and Government respond? We ask the experts
Adam Blackwell, Director of AI, Server and Advanced Technology at Hammer Distribution, a specialist distributor of enterprise server and storage solutions, advises businesses to future-proof their operations with a robust, custom-built Hybrid Infrastructure model, pointing out that on-premises control is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but essential.
“When one massive centralised system fails, an entire digital economy built on convenience finds its resilience is an afterthought. Moments like this, mirroring previous mass disruptions, show the vast, crippling power one single organisation can hold over global commerce. Redundancy and diversification are not just IT best practices, they are a fundamental business continuity imperative.”
Hammer Distribution says it can help such businesses keep core applications and sensitive data running, independent of public cloud stability, with the provision of on-premises datacentre-ready servers, powered by leading-edge technologies from partners such as Seagate, Quantum, Western Digital and DataCore.
Blackwell added: “Ask yourself: if your critical systems went offline for an hour, what would it cost you? Relying on a single point of failure is an unacceptable business risk in today’s always-on world.”
A wake-up call
His words are echoed by Stewart Laing, CEO of Asanti Data Centres, who describes the outages as a wake-up call for businesses that are over-reliant on one public cloud provider and lack robust resilience planning – failings that were highlighted in a survey for a recent Asanti white paper in which 72% of organisations said they had experienced significant downtime due to resilience failures in the last 12 months, with 60% struggling to restore normal operations.
Laing said: “Many organisations have embraced public cloud as a silver bullet, but the AWS outage shows what happens when you build everything on one foundation. This is not just about uptime. It’s about resilience by design, and asking the hard question: where was your business continuity plan?
“This outage doesn’t just hit organisations directly hosted on AWS, it ripples through entire supply chains. Even businesses that believe they’re insulated are likely to be affected when their third-party suppliers go down. With most organisations relying on multiple vendors, many of which depend on AWS behind the scenes, the result is a cascading, system-wide impact that’s far bigger than a single point of failure.”
Global disruption
Douglas Wadkins, CTO of Opengear, warns that growing demand for AI could increase the risk of outages and the time taken to recover from one.
He said: “The AWS outage underscores just how vulnerable global supply chains and digital networks have become. Even a single failure in a cloud region or streaming backbone can ripple across the stack, impacting everything from data movement to the models and applications that rely on it.
“The consequences of downtime are severe and immediate – lost revenue and customer trust, with potential knock-on effects in today’s fragile macro-economic and geopolitical environment. Simply reacting after the event isn’t enough. Recovery times remain too high because responses are often manual, fragmented and slow.
“When primary paths fail, securing access and rolling back systems can take critical hours. And this will only become more complex as AI demands grow, creating more points of potential failure. Building network resilience is essential. The ability to access networks remotely, isolate the issue and remediate it proactively is what prevents localised incidents from turning into global disruptions.”
Dangerous & negligent
Jamil Ahmed, Distinguished Engineer at Solace, pioneer of a multi-cloud, event-driven approach, added his voice to calls for a multi-cloud strategy.
He said: “Even as cloud technology evolves, failures within the system will inevitably happen. ‘One-of-a-kind’ extremely rare outages or issues continue to plague every service provider from time to time, which is why the need to store valuable information on multiple provider services, known as an event mesh, has arisen.
“From a business perspective, there are no excuses for having a single cloud provider. It’s multi- cloud all the way, treating cloud as commoditised compute, not building apps and services that are tied to knowing what cloud they’re in. Unfortunately, when businesses first introduced the cloud into their strategy about 10 years ago, they made multi-provider usage a problem to solve later on. It is now ‘later on,’ and the strategy of using one cloud service is demonstrably dangerous and negligent. Anyone adopting cloud without thought for multi-cloud on Day 1, should opt into an event mesh system or be fearful for that next ‘extremely rare’ event.”
Digital sovereignty
Hot on the heels of the AWS outage, problems with Microsoft Azure at the end of October added more grist to the mill.
Raphael Auphan, COO at encrypted solutions provider Proton, said: “For the second time in two weeks, we’ve seen a massive portion of the internet taken offline thanks to the mistakes of a solitary tech giant. As if we needed reminding, this is further proof that relying on a handful of major cloud providers creates serious vulnerabilities across the internet and puts whole economies at risk in the process.
“Just like the AWS outage, Azure’s latest failure showed how easily the ripples from an outage can spread globally and highlighted the danger of our global dependence on US technology. When the whole world relies on tech from a tiny number of companies from one country, then the whole world is vulnerable. The only answer for the UK, Europe and elsewhere is to prioritise digital sovereignty, in other words to develop their own native services. We need to stand on our own two feet if we’re going to have any chance in the future.”
Questions for Government
Mark Boost, CEO of UK cloud provider Civo, advocates greater commitment to sovereign cloud, especially by Government and critical infrastructure providers.
He said: “We should be asking the obvious question: why are so many critical UK institutions, from HMRC to major banks, dependent on a data centre on the east coast of the US? Sovereignty means having control when incidents like this happen, but too much of ours is currently outsourced to foreign cloud providers. The AWS outage is yet another reminder that when you put all your eggs in one basket, you’re gambling with critical infrastructure. When a single point of failure can take down HMRC, it becomes clear that our reliance on a handful of US tech giants has left core public services dangerously exposed.
“The more concentrated our infrastructure becomes, the more fragile and externally governed it is. Europe can’t afford to keep walking a digital tightrope without a safety net. If Europe is serious about digital sovereignty, it needs to accelerate its shift towards domestically governed and diversified infrastructure. Governments and regulators have a responsibility to create the conditions for real competition. That means rethinking procurement, funding sovereign alternatives and making resilience a baseline requirement.”
TALKING POINT
The dominance of the hyperscalers and US technology giants took some of the gloss off the $40 billion investment in the UK announced by Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Nvidia, Salesforce and others during Trump’s State Visit. But was Nick Clegg, as reported in the Guardian, right to dismiss their investment packages as ‘sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley’ and ‘mutton dressed as lamb’? Was he right to say that that investment would have happened anyway and that it could damage the UK tech sector by increasing reliance on US tech giants?
Stewart Laing, CEO, Asanti Data Centres: “We shouldn’t dismiss a $40 billion investment
in the UK as second-rate, but what we do need to clarify is how much of that is genuinely new investment and how much is existing or previously announced projects being re-packaged as something fresh.
“What we do know is that Microsoft has pledged approximately $30bn over the next few years for AI and cloud infrastructure in the UK. There are also new commitments from Nvidia, Google (£5bn) and AI infrastructure plans in growth zones.
“However, our recent research shows that UK IT leaders are increasingly cautious: 52% say they plan to reduce reliance on US cloud providers, with 95% citing data sovereignty, 93% data residency and concerns about jurisdiction under laws such as the US CLOUD Act as reasons. Repatriation of workloads is underway in many cases.
“So, while the headline numbers are encouraging, the key test will be transparency: which portions of the $40bn are new, which are already in motion, how much will be invested (versus planned) and how do those investments align with UK sovereignty, control and infrastructure capabilities.”
Mark Boost, CEO of Civo: “Any investment into our tech sector is worth celebrating and will help accelerate the AI ambitions of countless British businesses. That said, even though the ‘Tech Prosperity Deal’ is an impressive deal with a catchy name, I have to question which side is prospering more.
“If the UK isn’t careful, sooner or later the majority of our critical AI infrastructure will be owned by Big Tech. The US CLOUD Act means none of the ‘Big Three’ providers can offer true digital sovereignty, leaving British businesses and public bodies completely at the mercy of American data laws.
“Clearly, international investment is vital for our AI industries, and a package of this size will do a huge amount of good for quantum, AI and nuclear projects. However, we should also be building up our homegrown tech ecosystem and setting harder limits on the extent to which we’re willing to allow overseas control of our digital infrastructure. If not, we risk sacrificing our future digital sovereignty on the altar of short-term gains.”
James Walsh, Founder of Sytronix: “Any investment in the UK’s technology and AI market
is good in some respects. However, recently there have been several high-profile clashes between
the UK and US over free speech, information dissemination, the role of VPNs and anonymisation, as well as the powers our governments have in requesting data or operational changes to those in the other jurisdiction.
“I’m not sure how this investment will impact the regulatory environment or how available the UK public’s data is to US entities, but investment in UK data centre infrastructure is desperately needed. We’re leagues behind in the AI race and we need to close that distance. Just look at Taiwan, China, South Korea and the US, where there are so many innovative AI startups and hardware manufacturers. We’re forced to use their software and hardware because there simply isn’t an option from the UK. Even if there was, factors like the cost of electricity in the UK would price them out of the country.
“Incentives for domestic R&D and nurturing homegrown startups are essential to combat this and just as important as investment in fibre and silicon. That means creating the conditions for UK-based companies to scale globally, rather than simply being acquired by overseas giants, and ensuring that researchers, engineers and startup founders see the UK as a place where their ideas have the conditions to thrive, not just survive. Without that the UK risks becoming a well-connected consumer of AI, rather than a genuine creator and exporter of it.
“When the investment was announced, David Hogan, Nvidia’s head of enterprise sales for the Europe regions, was quoted as saying “This will truly make the UK an AI maker, not an AI taker”. If that is the case, I’m glad the government is taking steps to help the UK catch up with
our competitors. But I’m tentative nonetheless, because I’m wondering what the US is getting in return for such a significant investment.”
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