When the Cloud Goes Down: A Disaster Recovery Wake-Up Call

Just last week, we watched as Amazon Web Services (AWS) went offline and essential services everywhere ground to a halt. Overnight, websites, student portals, and even some government services were unreachable. As someone who has advised and led IT in higher education and government for years, this wasn’t just a headline—it was a sobering reminder. I realized just how high the stakes are when we rely on a single provider for our digital backbone. This kind of outage puts disaster recovery strategies to the ultimate test, and I couldn’t help but reflect: Are we truly prepared for failure, or are we risking it all, trusting that “it won’t happen to us” or that our service provider is “too big to fail”?

I’m not here to disparage AWS or any other cloud provider. Their innovation and scale have changed everything! But I see these moments as a call for honest self-reflection. A single point of failure can endanger not only technology but the trust people put in our institutions. Here are a few of my observations, wake-up calls, and resilience habits I believe every organization—especially in higher education, healthcare, and government—must embrace.

The Illusion of Invincibility in the Cloud

Cloud computing really has transformed our work. It offers scalability, cost-efficiency, and access to powerful tools that were once out of reach, especially for universities and government agencies with big ambitions but tight budgets. But all this convenience can lull even seasoned IT pros into a false sense of security. I’ve talked to colleagues who, until recently, truly believed that the big cloud providers were virtually unbreakable.

Then, an outage like AWS hits. I can imagine the horror stories: learning management systems (LMS) crashed, students locked out of their assignments, essential citizen services frozen, internal communication lines go dark, and emergency systems become unreachable. The costs—financial, reputational, operational—are not just hypothetical. We have all experience the impacts in real time.

And the problem usually traces back to one core issue: putting all our eggs in one vendor’s basket. No matter how robust a provider’s own redundancy may be, systemic failures can and do occur. If that happens and you’re heavily dependent on a single provider, your entire operation can stall—and restarting isn’t always as simple as flipping a switch.

How I’ve Built Resilient Disaster Recovery Strategies

Disaster recovery, in my experience, isn’t just about having data backups. It’s about designing a strategy that keeps real people working, teaching, serving, and learning—especially when things go wrong. That means moving well beyond the basics.

My Take on the Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Approach

After seeing enough outages to learn better, I’ve shifted my client approach. Redundancy starts with not being tied to a single provider. That’s why I promote a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy whenever possible.

Multi-Cloud Strategy: I use services from two or more different public cloud providers—think AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud. Some clients prefer an active-active approach, balancing the load across providers, but for some less critical services an active-passive approach (where a backup stands by) is enough. The key is this: no one platform ever has the keys to the kingdom.
Hybrid-Cloud Solutions: For sensitive applications or those with particular compliance requirements, I sometimes recommend a hybrid setup. Some workloads stay securely on-premise, while others leverage the public cloud’s flexibility or edge networks. That way, clients have some comfort that certain core functions can keep running even if the cloud side fails.

Redundancy Isn’t Optional

Every time I work the a client, I ask: What’s you minimum viable technology stack? I identify every core system and map out a redundant backup plan—different data centers, different providers, even different geographical regions. For instance, if a university’s LMS is critical (and it often is), standing up a scaled-back version in a secondary cloud is able to process assignment submissions in a pinch. This type of planning can save a semester in a disaster.

The Relentless Power of Testing

Another lesson learned: untested plans are dangerous. Tabletop exercises can provide a measure of faith that your plan will work, but actual testing can verify your are ready. Here’s a suggested testing plan:

Walk stakeholders through verbal simulations to clarify gaps and roles.
Run partial failover tests on non-critical systems, making sure that both the technology and the people using the technology are ready for the unexpected.
At least once a year, do a full-scale simulation—switching critical services to the disaster recovery environment. These exercises constantly reveal unexpected dependencies and bottlenecks, turning theoretical resilience into actual preparedness.

Communication: Always the Highest Priority

When things break, technology is only half the job; communicating quickly and clearly is the other half. Always include a robust communication protocol in disaster plans. Specify who contacts students, faculty, citizens, and employees, and through which channels (especially if primary ones are down). I Stockpile ready-to-go templates for different scenarios—because in a crisis, time is everything.

Most people aren’t unreasonable: they don’t need perfection, just transparency. A prompt, honest message that describes what happened, what you’re doing, and the estimated timeline for recovery preserves trust and helps manage frustration. If there’s one thing we all should know, it’s that silence is the real enemy.

Recommended Actionable Moves

Every outage is a chance to get better. Here are the steps I take—and encourage other IT leaders to take—after each and every major incident:

Audit Single Points of Failure: Systematically scan every crucial system for over-reliance on single vendors, data centers, or infrastructure.
Revisit Your Cloud Strategy: Assess whether it’s time to diversify or hybridize, especially for critical applications.
Schedule a Disaster Recovery Test: Never wait until “next quarter.” If there’s not already a simulation on the calendar, I make it happen.
Review Your Communication Plan: Make sure stakeholder outreach isn’t dependent on impacted systems and is crystal clear.

Conclusion: A Call to Raise the Bar

At this point, cloud outages aren’t rare enough to be ignored. They’re a known, manageable risk. Every incident is a chance to course-correct, to ask tougher questions, and to double down on resilience. We all should embrace redundancy, relentless testing, and honest communication. These strategies make the difference between chaos and calm. Now more than ever, all leaders in healthcare, higher education and government to move beyond assumptions and plan for the realities of failure. Our students, citizens, and colleagues are counting on us—and I intend not to let them down.