Thomas Berndorfer is the CEO of Connecting Software.
A UN Trade and Development report found that around $270 billion was invested in data centers worldwide in 2025, as they have become a cornerstone of the global economy and integral to nearly every business process today.
In response, as the Uptime Institute has noted, hyperscalers and major cloud providers have invested significantly in securing data centers, often with round-the-clock security and top-of-the-line cyberdefence.
The reality, however, is that it’s nearly impossible to protect these buildings from everything, especially as they have become increasingly attractive targets for geopolitical adversaries and cybercriminals.
As the leader of a firm that helps organizations manage their data, I believe outages are one of the most impactful risks affecting businesses today, which is why it’s crucial to develop a business continuity plan (BCP) that evolves.
Why Data Centers Are At Risk
In March of this year, three AWS data centers were hit in missile strikes in the UAE and Bahrain. This left “millions of people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi … unable to pay for a taxi, order a food delivery or check their bank balance on their mobile apps,” according to The Guardian.
Natural events like fires can have equally devastating consequences. For instance, a 2021 fire at OVHCloud in Strasbourg took 3.6 million websites down.
Similarly, for such complicated technological operations, data centers are significantly vulnerable to simple human error. Nearly 40% of data center operators surveyed by the Uptime Institute in 2022 experienced an outage caused by human error, mostly from employees not following proper procedure.
These risks are being exacerbated by large technological overhauls in data centers, with Forrester noting that, as hyperscalers prioritize GPU-centric data centers for AI workloads, they expect “at least two major multiday outages” in 2026.
Businesses must keep each of these risks in mind when preparing for events that could impact cloud access.
How BCP Has To Evolve
A major outage can cost the economy billions of dollars. When access to critical SaaS apps, email, CRMs and collaboration platforms is lost, business can grind to a halt.
In my experience, many businesses, especially those that deeply depend on an outside SaaS platform, have some kind of plan for when their access to the cloud goes out. This often includes some amount of offline capability or an old, rarely updated local backup.
However, even when businesses possess limited backups, these can be useless without the surrounding systems that enable employees to utilize, share and make the most out of their data. There is a significant difference between a simple backup plan and actual business continuity.
For businesses to manage the risk of outages, they need to do the internal work to assess their business needs.
First, both IT and company leadership should identify the essential processes within the company that would be affected by a complete cloud outage. For instance, how would remote teams communicate if there were no email or internal message system? How would sales teams access critical contracts without access to the CRM? If outside cloud services are integral to important business functions, you need a well-thought-out and well-communicated plan to continue without it.
Second, they would need to identify current service level agreements and contractual obligations an outage could affect. Would important clients be affected if your systems went down? When would it trigger the cancellation of contracts? The greater the possible effect, the greater the urgency for a more total solution
Third, are there viable alternatives to your processes? If you work via Microsoft, is there a Google equivalent that could do the work similarly? If so, companies should start the work to train their employees on differing systems to ensure they aren’t caught on the back foot if one goes down.
How To Respond To An Outage
There are a variety of different backup solutions and cloud strategies that can help once a business has identified its key needs. To develop true independence from cloud outage risks, teams and processes need to be flexible and adaptable.
Companies can opt to use multiple regions within a single cloud provider, shielding them from many regional-specific problems. Alternatively, they can use local backups or edge computing that allow them to insulate certain key data files from outages.
In my experience, staying agile over two completely separate environments—whether cloud to cloud, or cloud to on-prem—often strikes the best balance, especially given that current technology allows you to synchronize different environments.
This solution isn’t without its difficulties, as it introduces levels of data governance and overhead, but for businesses where downtime might result in critical losses, even this complexity can be preferable to a sudden outage.
Because, as businesses look to the future, they can’t just be focused on technical outages to data centers, but the very real risks of physical and cyberattacks that could instantly threaten their data and capability to operate.
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