Dive Brief:
- AWS services in the Middle East remain disrupted as of Tuesday morning after multiple drone strikes impacted local facilities, the company confirmed in its status page. The company declined CIO Dive’s request for further comment and said all updates would be provided via its status page.
- In the United Arab Emirates, two drone strikes took AWS data centers out of commission on Sunday, disrupting the availability of services, according to an update posted Monday evening.
- Another drone strike near AWS facilities in Bahrain “caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” according to a March 2 entry on its status page.
Dive Insight:
As conflict escalates in the Middle East, disruption to critical cloud services highlights the importance of business continuity plans and data backups.
“Our current recommendation to clients is that, if they have critical applications and data that live in the Middle East currently, and can live somewhere else, they should be activating those plans to ensure that data is backed up … and is not likely to be vaporized by the type of events that we’ve been seeing,” said Lydia Leong, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner.
AWS also stressed on its status page that affected customers should rely on their disaster recovery plans and turn to alternate regions until service has been restored. The company declined to provide CIO Dive with an estimated timeline for service recovery.
Executives are closely monitoring the effects of global conflict — and how it shapes infrastructure provisioning decisions. Three in four business leaders expressed concern about the geopolitical risks of storing and managing data in global cloud environments, a Kyndryl report published in November found.
Local requirements — including digital sovereignty regulations — led nearly two-thirds of business leaders to adjust cloud strategies, with more than 4 in 5 companies intentionally operating multiple clouds in search of redundancy.
“Digital sovereignty and maintaining control of critical digital assets, including cloud services, data storage, software and systems, network platforms and more has never been more important,” said Maxine Holt, VP, enterprise and channel research, at Omdia, in an email to CIO Dive.
The well-established reliability of cloud providers has mistakenly led some CIOs to believe redundancy and disaster recovery strategies were unimportant, according to Leong.
“They’ve always been wrong,” Leong said. “This is a very stark example of why.”
Informa owns a controlling stake in Informa TechTarget, the publisher behind CIO Dive and parent company of Omdia. Informa has no influence over CIO Dive’s coverage.
