www.managedITmag.co.uk 25 ASK THE EXPERTS continued... Adam Blackwell, Director of AI, Server and Advanced Technology at Hammer Distribution, a specialist distributor of enterprise server and storage solutions, advises businesses to future-proof their operations with a robust, custom-built Hybrid Infrastructure model, pointing out that on-premises control is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but essential. “When one massive centralised system fails, an entire digital economy built on convenience finds its resilience is an afterthought. Moments like this, mirroring previous mass disruptions, show the vast, crippling power one single organisation can hold over global commerce. Redundancy and diversification are not just IT best practices, they are a fundamental business continuity imperative.” Hammer Distribution says it can help such businesses keep core applications and sensitive data running, independent of public cloud stability, with the provision of on-premises datacentreready servers, powered by leading-edge technologies from partners such as Seagate, Quantum, Western Digital and DataCore. Blackwell added: “Ask yourself: if your critical systems went offline for an hour, what would it cost you? Relying on a single point of failure is an unacceptable business risk in today’s always-on world.” A wake-up call His words are echoed by Stewart Laing, CEO of Asanti Data Centres, who describes the outages as a wake-up call for businesses that are over-reliant on one public cloud provider and lack robust resilience planning – failings that were highlighted in a survey for a recent Asanti white paper in which 72% of organisations said they had experienced significant downtime due to resilience failures in the last 12 months, with 60% struggling to restore normal operations. Laing said: “Many organisations have embraced public cloud as a silver bullet, but the AWS outage shows what happens when you build everything on one foundation. This is not just about uptime. It’s about resilience by design, and asking the hard question: where was your business continuity plan? “This outage doesn’t just hit organisations directly hosted on AWS, it ripples through entire supply chains. Even businesses that believe they’re insulated are likely to be affected when their third-party suppliers go down. With most organisations relying on multiple vendors, many of which depend on AWS behind the scenes, the result is a cascading, system-wide impact that’s far bigger than a single point of failure.” Global disruption Douglas Wadkins, CTO of Opengear, warns that growing demand for AI could increase the risk of outages and the time taken to recover from one. He said: “The AWS outage underscores just how vulnerable global supply chains and digital networks have become. Even a single failure in a cloud region or streaming backbone can ripple across the stack, impacting everything from data movement to the models and applications that rely on it. “The consequences of downtime are severe and immediate – lost revenue and customer trust, with potential knock-on effects in today’s fragile macro-economic and geopolitical environment. Simply reacting after the event isn’t enough. Recovery times remain too high because responses are often manual, fragmented and slow. “When primary paths fail, securing access and rolling back systems can take critical hours. And this will only become more complex as AI demands grow, creating more points of potential failure. Building network resilience is essential. The ability to access networks remotely, isolate the issue and remediate it proactively is what prevents Recent outages at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure once again highlighted the vulnerability of organisations that rely on a single cloud platform. How should businesses and Government respond? We ask the experts Ask the experts Adam Blackwell Stewart Laing “When the whole world relies on tech from a tiny number of companies from one country, then the whole world is vulnerable.” Raphael Auphan, COO, Proton
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