However, what I’m seeing in my consulting work, and what many CIOs and CTOs will privately admit, is that resilience is too often an afterthought. The impact of even brief outages on Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud now ricochets far beyond the IT department. Entire revenue streams grind to a halt, and support queues overflow. Customer trust erodes, and recovery costs skyrocket, both financial and reputational. Yet investment in multicloud strategies, hybrid redundancies, and failover contingencies lags behind the pace of risk. We’re paying the price for that oversight, and as cloud adoption deepens, the costs will only increase.
Systems at the breaking point
Hyperscale cloud operations are inherently complex. As these platforms become more successful, they grow larger and more complicated, supporting a wide range of services such as AI, analytics, security, and Internet of Things. Their layered control planes are interconnected; a single misconfiguration, such as with Microsoft Azure, can quickly lead to a major disaster.
The size of these environments makes them hard to operate without error. Automated tools help, but each new code change, feature, and integration increases the likelihood of mistakes. As companies move more data and logic to the cloud, even minor disruptions can have significant effects. Providers face pressure to innovate, cut costs, and scale, often sacrificing simplicity to achieve these goals.
