Firms need resilience that goes beyond threat prevention: Experts on AWS outage

New Delhi, Oct 21 Modern IT ecosystems are complex, interconnected, and highly dependent on a handful of critical cloud providers, Keeper Security co-founder and CEO Darren Guccione observed on the recent Amazon Web Services' outage that impacted many daily apps and about a thousand websites.

For enterprise organisations, this incident highlighted the need for resilience that goes beyond threat prevention.

The cyber expert said that business continuity plans should account for both cyber and non-cyber disruptions, ensuring that privileged access, authentication and backup systems remain secure and functional, even when core infrastructure is affected.

When an incident of this scale occurs, whether through technical failure or misconfiguration, the impact on global operations can be just as severe as a coordinated cyber attack, he added.

The Keeper Security founder stated that while major internet outages often raise immediate concerns of a cyber attack, current reports indicate the significant AWS disruption was caused by an internal infrastructure fault, rather than malicious activity.

"It’s an important distinction, as not every system’s failure is the result of a cybersecurity breach, and conflating the two can blur understanding of where the real risks lie," he said.

According to him, Zero-trust frameworks and Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions are designed to protect against malicious actors; however, they can also play a critical role in maintaining visibility and control during system outages, while improving a customer's resilience and incident response capabilities.

"True resilience isn’t just about preventing attacks; it’s about ensuring stability when failures occur," he added.

On Monday, there was a significant worldwide outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) that lasted for about 15 hours. Numerous online services, including popular social media sites, banking applications, streaming services, and video games, were disrupted

Amazon's AWS is the world's biggest cloud provider, commanding 30 per cent, while Microsoft's Azure is 20 per cent, and Google at 13 per cent, according to Statista.

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