Cloud outages are inevitable, but lock-in shouldn’t be

By Vini Cardoso (pictured), Field Chief Technology Officer, Cloudera Australia and New Zealand

The recent global outage involving a major cloud provider was a brutal reminder that even the most trusted digital infrastructure can fail.

Across Australia and New Zealand, the domino effect was felt in banking, retail, and healthcare, where uptime is non-negotiable. In these regions, research has shown that for nearly a third of organisations, the hourly cost of high-impact IT outages ranges from US$1 – 3 million.

When you consider these numbers, you realise this isn’t just an IT headache. It’s a multi-million-dollar strategic failure. However, this wasn’t a failure of the cloud provider only. It was also a failure of strategy by companies.

For years, we’ve watched organisations pile all their digital eggs into one cloud provider’s basket, creating a critical single point of failure. When that provider fails, so does everything built on top of it.

In fact, it’s no surprise that Gartner predicts that by 2028, 25% of organisations will have experienced significant dissatisfaction with their cloud adoption due to unrealistic expectations, suboptimal implementation and/or uncontrolled costs.

Rethinking Resilience in a Cloud-First World

For a while, hybrid cloud has been positioned as the answer to balancing agility with control. But the recent outage revealed a blind spot: hybrid strategies that rely on a single public cloud provider remain exposed. They may offer flexibility between on-premises and cloud, but not between clouds.

True resilience looks completely different. It means your critical data workloads are natively portable. Imagine being able to move your core applications not just between regions, but also between entirely different cloud providers, and back to your on-prem data centre, without the cost and disruption of a massive, months-long refactoring project.

That’s the only way to ensure that when one environment goes down, another can take over quickly, securely, and without major disruption.

The Complexity Behind the Ideal

Of course, this is easier said than done. Each cloud provider has its own APIs, services, and security models. Moving a workload between them often requires significant rework, which few organisations have the time or resources to undertake in the middle of a crisis.

The only way this works is if you design for portability from day one. You need a consistent, open data platform that allows your data, your governance rules, and your security policies to travel with the workload, no matter where it needs to run, moving the conversation beyond uptime and disaster recovery.

A Wake-Up Call for ANZ Enterprises

For organisations across ANZ, this outage should serve as a wake-up call. It’s a chance to stress-test assumptions, revisit architecture decisions, and ask hard questions about where risk still lives in the stack.

Hybrid cloud remains a strong foundation. But without multi-cloud capability, it’s incomplete. The next disruption is not a matter of if, it’s when. And when it comes, the organisations that have built for flexibility will be the ones that stay online, stay trusted, and stay ahead.

It’s time to build a true hybrid, multi-cloud data strategy – one built on an open platform that guarantees workload portability and frees you from the exact lock-in that just cost your peers millions.

Don’t just build for resilience – build for freedom.