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Insights from Forrester’s Brent Ellis and Dario Maisto on Challenges Facing Large Enterprises
The recent cascading outage across the U.S. East Coast, caused by a domain name system failure within Amazon Web Services’ DynamoDB service, underscores the inherent risks associated with intricate cloud architecture dependencies. Brent Ellis, Principal Analyst at Forrester, noted the deficiencies in achieving genuine multi-region cloud resilience and the complexity that comes with it.
Cloud-based services are often dependent on both proprietary code and third-party applications, complicating the efforts of large enterprises to navigate these interdependencies effectively. Ellis pointed out that many organizations have not yet taken the necessary steps to invest in fault tolerance. This includes building redundancies, enhancing error detection, and implementing recovery mechanisms to mitigate the risk of complete system failure.
Addressing these challenges requires fundamental changes. “Organizations need to re-evaluate their foundational architecture, determining if a service’s reliability hinges on interdependencies with other regions, and if so, they must reorganize their architecture,” Ellis emphasized.
This outage also raises critical discussions about cloud and data sovereignty among European nations. Dario Maisto, Forrester’s Senior Analyst, highlighted concerns regarding reliance on U.S.-based cloud providers and the potential impact on European innovation and competitiveness. “The lack of jurisdictional authority within the European Union over these foreign vendors poses systemic risks,” he remarked, stressing that many European enterprises depend on such vendors.
In a recent interview with Information Security Media Group, Ellis and Maisto elaborated on several key points, including how the AWS outage spread across dependent services, the true resilience of enterprises across multiple regions and clouds, and the feasibility of achieving cloud sovereignty in Europe.
Brent Ellis conducts research focused on technology resilience, backup solutions, storage, and mainframe modernization at Forrester. He aims to assist tech leaders in cultivating agile and resilient organizations through practical yet innovative strategies.
On the other hand, Dario Maisto specializes in public cloud, digital sovereignty, and SAP migration, advising technology executives on maneuvering through the continually evolving cloud environment.
