Question: Which cloud strategy should I consider for my organization — multicloud or multiregion?
Ryan Sydlik, Security Engineer, Telos Corp.: The lesson to be learned from the AWS outage is that a multiregion strategy within a single cloud is effective and a multicloud strategy has no added benefit. The outage affected US-EAST-1 Northern Virginia, but it did not affect US-EAST-2 Ohio. A workload that is able to fail over, whether automatically or with some manual effort, would have been able to weather the outage. This also highlights the importance of disaster recovery testing. When an outage is relatively short like this AWS outage, if you are not confident in failover, you might not judge it to be worth the risk for a few hours. There is also another pitfall without proper testing: The region you are failing over to might be fine, but your workload might still fail to recover because of a misconfiguration or bug in your failover process that was not found due to a lack of testing.
