When a major cloud region goes down, as we saw recently with AWS, the effects go beyond just taking applications offline.
The outage shined a harsh light on the false assumptions enterprises have about “resilience by default”.
Here’s the hard truth: just because you are on the cloud doesn’t guarantee uptime. Resilience is an engineering discipline.
Let’s look at how to build multi-region and multi-cloud resilience the smart way, both from a technical and organizational lens.
The Myth of Cloud Invincibility
The first big false assumption: many organizations assume moving workloads to a hyperscaler like AWS, Azure, GCP just magically provides availability.
While those providers all have leading reliability SLAs, there is a huge, invisible dependency graph inside any hyperscaler: their own power and networking, storage control planes, etc.
When something fails, that outage can propagate horizontally across regions or vertically to affect other services you’re using.
If your architecture assumes single-region or single-provider, it’s not a matter of if you’ll be affected during a regional disruption. It’s a matter of when.
The Foundation: Multi-AZ is the Minimum
Before you jump into complex multi-cloud patterns, there’s some basic work to do with multi-region. In fact, you should start here: this is your foundation.
- Multi-AZ (Availability Zone) deployments protect against localized data center failures.
- Use cross-AZ load balancing and replication for databases.
- Test your failover procedures periodically — don’t assume they’ll work just because they exist in a runbook.
The fact is many companies discover they don’t need to go multi-region at all because a properly architected multi-AZ deployment already takes care of 80–90% of business-critical systems outage risks.
When to Consider Multi-Region
If you have business SLAs around extremely low RTO/RPO, data residency, and compliance requirements to keep data in specific countries, or certain customer-facing apps that are literally mission-critical, you’re in the realm where multi-region replication is required.
On the other hand, this is where things can get quite complex and more expensive.
A multi-region design requires much more active-active or active-passive data replication, latency-aware routing (Route 53, Cloudflare DNS routing, etc), and consistent CI/CD pipelines between regions.
Strategy tip: It’s important to know that not all workloads need multi-region replication and failover. Reserve this for truly customer-critical and business-impacting systems and services (and set up a documented “resilience tiering” model to determine this).
The Multi-Cloud Question: When Does It Make Sense?
Multi-cloud is often hyped as the pinnacle of resilience, but is it always the right choice? Use multi-cloud when:
- You have business, geopolitical, or regulatory reasons to avoid vendor lock-in.
- Your workload uses best-of-breed or niche services (AI on Google, analytics on Snowflake, compute on AWS, etc. ).
- You have a mature DevOps culture that can manage complex multi-provider infrastructure-as-code (IaC) environments.
Keep in mind: the more clouds you manage (say 2+) the more operational overhead you have: toolchain parity, security frameworks, skills and training on the team, cost governance, etc. All of this is doubled for two or more providers.
Pro tip: Design for “cloud portability” without full-blown multi-cloud. Build systems that use open standards like Kubernetes, Terraform, OpenTelemetry for IaC, etc. to keep your options open without carrying the multi-cloud sticker price.
The Forgotten Pillar: Cost-Aware Resilience
Resilience must be cost-effective, or you will simply overengineer your redundancy to the point where you’re burning cash without proportional business value.
Here’s how to be financially disciplined about resilience:
- FinOps governance: Track the cost of your idle standby systems.
- Use spot or reserved/savings plans for DR environments not running 100% of the time.
- Tier your workloads: Not every workload deserves the same level of redundancy and failover.
- Simulate disaster recovery — test your failover cost in real scenarios.
Building an Organization That Can Handle Outages
Technology alone won’t save you when disaster hits. People and processes will.
- Outline clear incident response playbooks, escalation paths for response and DR
- Run “chaos engineering” drills to simulate region-wide failures.
- Build data literacy and ownership into teams so they understand cost, performance, and reliability tradeoffs of their designs.
Cloud Resilience is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
Cloud resilience is not a project with a beginning and end. It’s an ongoing discipline that requires planning, execution, and organizational readiness.
Building resilience is not only about engineering, but also about cultivating a culture of resilience within your organization. The organizations that survive and recover quickly with minimum business disruption are the ones that:
Architect systems with failure in mind, not perfection.
Embed resilience into their design DNA.
Balance smart redundancy with cost accountability, data ownership and strong FinOps governance.
As the AWS outage recently reminded us — resilience is not just about minimizing downtime. It’s also about trust, data integrity, and business continuity when the unexpected occurs.
Eager to fold greater technological and organizational resilience into your data strategy? Talk to one of our experts today.
