Lessons Your Business Can Learn from the Amazon Web Services Outage by Brandon Bowers
Posted on October 27, 2025
by
Brandon Bowers
The recent global outage of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud platform is a powerful reminder that even the most robust IT infrastructure can experience disruptions. Whether or not your business was among the thousands taken offline, now is a good time to evaluate your organization’s reliance on technology and the resilience strategies you have in place to mitigate similar risks.
Understand Your Dependencies
Most businesses do not fully recognize the complexity and interdependence of their various IT services. For example, even if your company does not use AWS for its most critical applications, it is likely that your business still experienced significant disruptions during the outage because your email security, payment processing, and vendor systems did. Take the time to create a dependency map that visualizes how all your applications, IT systems, and processes rely on one another. This will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of your IT footprint, enabling you to effectively identify risks and manage issues as they arise.
Implement a Multi-Cloud Approach
No system, no matter how reliable, is immune to a single point of failure that can bring your entire operations to a standstill. To minimize this risk, consider using cloud computing services from multiple providers, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or IBM. Spread your workload across different services from different providers based on your business’s unique needs. At a minimum, host your applications across multiple data centers from one of the top vendors. Doing so provides you with the highest levels of pricing flexibility, reliability and security, minimizing the risks of significant business disruptions when one system goes down.
Test, Test and Test Again
Once you put your IT strategy in place, manually test the system and your processes to ensure that your team knows what to do when an outage occurs, including your protocols for communicating those disruptions to employees and clients.
Maintain Business Continuity Basics
The real question for business owners is not whether another outage will occur (it will), but whether they are prepared to respond when the next one does. Take the time to develop a response team, document manual processes for maintaining essential operations and establish clear channels of communication between your company and all its stakeholders, including the various cloud providers you engage.
About the Author: Brandon Bowers is director of Managed Cyber Security Solutions with Berkowitz Pollack Brant Advisors + CPAs, where he provides businesses, professional services firms and family offices with business continuity and recovery, cybersecurity and fully outsourced help desk services. He can be reached at the CPA firm’s Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., office at (954) 712-7000 or info@bpbcpa.com.
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