The cloud availability fallacy: The biggest risk of the digital era

The recent outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which disrupted cloud services and affected countless organizations, once again highlights the extent to which businesses rely on cloud infrastructure and how critical it is to understand the limits of that dependency. In an era where nearly every business operation depends on remote data, it’s easy to forget that this infrastructure isn’t abstract or automatic—it’s built on systems, people, and business decisions.

It’s convenient to assume that the cloud is always stable and secure. But this perception blurs the lines of responsibility. While cloud providers deliver a broad and reliable infrastructure, the true responsibility for data availability lies with the organization itself. The instant data access is lost, the business suffers immediate consequences. Every organization must ask a simple question: What is our plan when the service isn’t available?

Ron Kimchi.

Although most organizations have backup systems, in practice, these often prove useless in real time. Transitioning to an alternative environment, especially in another geographic region within the same provider, is perceived as complex and risky, and thus postponed until the very last moment. Until recently, switching in real time to a different cloud provider was nearly impossible, leaving companies hesitant and waiting for the problem to resolve instead of taking action.

A modern backup strategy must be built on a fundamentally different principle: data must always remain accessible, even during an outage. This is not an insurance policy waiting for an emergency, but a proactive strategy that enables operational continuity. It’s now possible to design strategies that bridge between different regions—or even different cloud providers - so that organizations can maintain full access to their data, even during disruptions.

Even if an organization chooses not to execute an immediate failover, it must ensure that its data remains accessible and usable. In a world where business decisions are made every minute, the ability to read, search, and analyze data during an outage is what keeps the organization moving forward.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen time and again that in critical moments, the real challenge is organizational, not just technological. Leaders hesitate to activate contingency processes, multi-cloud strategies remain theoretical, and customers must restore entire environments just to reach their backed-up data. I’ve seen it before, most notably during Amazon’s major outage in 2021, when I led AWS’s disaster recovery services. Then, like now, many organizations found themselves cut off from vital information without a clear action plan. The experience taught me that the issue isn’t just technology - it’s mindset.

Data accessibility must be an integral part of business planning. Instead of focusing solely on recovering full cloud environments, organizations must think about continuous data availability. During major incidents, countless customers rush to switch to other regions, overwhelming the providers’ capacity. That’s why maintaining direct access to backed-up data is critical.

This week’s outage is a reminder that while the cloud is a vital infrastructure, it’s not infallible. Outages are an inevitable part of a complex digital world. What determines an organization’s resilience is not whether it can prevent failures - but how it prepares for them. Those who plan ahead, design for resilience, and act in real time are the ones who keep operating, even when the cloud goes dark.

Ron Kimchi is the Co-Founder and CTO of Eon.