Business Continuity Management / Disaster Recovery
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Governance & Risk Management
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IT Risk Management
Forrester’s Brent Ellis and Dario Maisto on Lessons Learned for Large Enterprises
The cascading outage across the U.S. East Coast triggered this week by a domain name system failure inside Amazon Web Services’ DynamoDB service demonstrates the risks of deep cloud architectural dependencies and the challenges of building true multi-region cloud resilience, said Brent Ellis, principal analyst at Forrester.
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Cloud-based services rely on both internally developed code and vendor applications, as sorting through the dependencies within cloud architectures is difficult for large enterprises. That’s why many organizations still aren’t ready to pay the price for fault tolerance – building redundancies, improving error detection and installing recovery mechanisms to avoid a complete system shutdown, Ellis said.
“If people really want to address this issue, they have to start from scratch and work from the bottom up and figure out if this is a service that cannot fail based on some interdependency with another region, and they have to re-architect it,” Ellis said.
The outage also raises questions about cloud and data sovereignty for European countries, and whether independence from U.S.-based cloud providers is possible without stifling innovation and competitiveness, said Forrester Senior Analyst Dario Maisto.
“There is no jurisdictional control in the European Union over these foreign vendors. And so if these vendors are leveraged by a majority of European enterprises that work with cloud, then it does become a problem, a systemic risk for the continent,” Maisto said.
In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, Maisto and Ellis discussed:
- How the AWS outage cascaded across multiple dependent services;
- Whether enterprises are truly resilient across multiple regions and clouds;
- The likelihood of ever achieving cloud sovereignty for Europe.
Brent Ellis leads Forrester’s research on technology resilience, backup, storage and mainframe modernization. He helps technology leaders build adaptive, creative and resilient organizations through modern yet practical strategies.
Maisto, a senior analyst at Forrester, specializes in public cloud, digital sovereignty and SAP migration. He advises technology executives on navigating the evolving cloud landscape.
