Thoughts about...

Your cloud survived everything except the real world

OPINION

War damage, air traffic chaos, and a storage shortage expose the cost of treating resilience as someone else's problem

Rupert
Goodwins
  Register columnist

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Amazon Web Services said last week that war damage to its Middle East infrastructure had permanently destroyed
resources and data hosted exclusively in its now rather badly named
Bahrain Availability Zones. The damage overwhelmed the resilience built
into the region. Customers without copies elsewhere no longer had their
data. Sorry about that.

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Physical destruction is not the only threat. A major outage of the UK air traffic control system in September,
which stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers and led to thousands
of flight cancellations, was reportedly triggered by a military
aircraft filing an incompatible flight plan.

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AI datacenter operators are swallowing much of the available capacity,
with drives selling out faster than tickets for a Taylor Swift tour. Western Digital had allocated its entire 2026 hard-drive production run by mid-February.

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Even outside the immediate reach of drones and missiles – a distinction
that feels less reassuring with every passing month – infrastructure is
operating in increasingly hostile conditions. Cables get cut, climate
goes chaotic, criminals encrypt, commanders-in-chief go crazy. This
makes planning for and implementing a sound data resilience strategy
very hard, at exactly the same time as it becomes more important.

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Commerce has confronted a similar problem before, if we extend the
backup-as-insurance metaphor. The development of marine insurance in
14th-century Italian city-states spread risk and helped make what became
today's global trading network viable. The loss of a vessel was no
longer an existential disaster for its owner. Provided insurers
understood and priced the risks correctly, the market could grow in
lockstep with mercantile activity. Data resilience has a similar dynamic...

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The Lloyd's of London insurance market prospered around the turn of
the 20th century amid two technology booms: steam-powered merchant
shipping and the cable and wireless networks that supplied the
information needed to coordinate global trade. Then war came. Insurers
responded by separating war risk into its own category, with government
support helping to keep ordinary marine insurance affordable while
covering higher-risk voyages separately.

It may take the
combination of geopolitical instability and intense competition for
storage to make enterprises perform similar calculations about their own
precious cargoes of information. When AWS can lose an entire region and
critical national infrastructure can fail without an adequate backup,
those risks have plainly not been priced in properly. There is no global
market where AWS, NATS, or your organization can buy the data
equivalent of war-risk insurance, although imagining what one might look
like suggests some intriguing possibilities.

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https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/09/21/your-cloud-survived-ev...