Why Organisations Must Rethink Resilience in AWS, Azure and Third-Party Datacentres
This week’s AWS outage on 20th October 2025 in the US East-1 region caught many UK organisations off guard. You’d expect a disruption in a US based cloud region to have minimal impact here in the UK but it did. Banks like Lloyds Banking Group and departments such as HMRC experienced service issues, prompting a bigger question:
Do organisations really know where their cloud services reside—and what happens when they fail?
While this incident involved AWS, the implications stretch far beyond. Whether you’re using Microsoft Azure, a third-party datacentre, or a hybrid mix of both, the same concern applies: how resilient is your setup, really?
The Danger of Default Settings
In many cases, cloud services are deployed using default settings often without questioning where those services are physically hosted. In Azure, that might be UK South or West Europe. In third-party datacentres, it could be a single location with no geographic redundancy.
The assumption is that “someone else” has taken care of failover and continuity. But has that ever been tested? Is it even configured? And if it is, does anyone know where the failover actually goes?
A Hidden Risk
Many organisations may unknowingly rely on infrastructure in regions or datacentres outside their control or even outside their intended jurisdiction. This isn’t just a technical issue; it’s a business risk. If a single region or datacentre fails, and your services are tied to it, the impact can be immediate and widespread.
It’s also a compliance risk. If failover routes through a non-UK or non-EU region, there could be GDPR implications especially if sensitive data is involved.
Questions Worth Asking
At The SAM Club, we’re not here to provide technical solutions but we do believe in asking the right questions. Here are a few every organisation should consider:
- Do we know where our cloud services and datacentre workloads are physically located?
- Have we ever tested our failover setup and do we know where it fails over to?
- Are we relying on default settings without realising it?
- Could our data be flowing through regions that pose compliance risks?
- Are we assuming resilience without verifying it?
Why Independence Matters
This is where independent software asset management plays a vital role. It’s not just about managing licenses it’s about helping organisations ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and make informed decisions.
Because when the cloud stumbles or the datacentre goes dark, it’s not the vendor who feels the pain – it’s you