Your Cloud Survived Everything Except the Real World
The Register, Monday, September 21st, 2026
Rupert Goodwins argues cloud resilience fails against real-world threats like war, weak backups, and an AI-driven storage crunch.
Columnist Rupert Goodwins argues cloud infrastructure's reputation for resilience breaks down against real-world threats. He cites AWS permanently losing data in its Bahrain region due to military damage, showing that resilience within one region isn't the same as an independent offsite backup.
He also points to the UK's air traffic control system failing without adequate backup, reportedly because redundant storage was deemed too costly.
Separately, AI datacenter expansion has consumed global storage capacity, with Western Digital exhausting its entire 2026 hard-drive production by February, making backups more expensive.
Goodwins urges organizations to price backup risk properly instead of treating resilience as someone else's problem.