When One Cloud Falters, Everyone Feels It: What SMEs Should Learn from Big Outages
The internet feels limitless, yet much of it now runs on infrastructure owned by a small group of hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. This concentration brings efficiency and scale, but when a major platform stumbles the ripple effects are impossible to ignore.
A recent disruption linked to AWS temporarily took popular services offline and interrupted everything from banking and government logins to smart doorbells and social apps. The incident was resolved within hours, but it highlighted a simple truth: a concentrated cloud market creates concentrated points of failure.
What Outages Teach SMEs
Cloud has become a utility, and we only notice it when it fails. When thousands of organisations depend on the same provider, an issue in one region or service can cascade across sectors. This is not a criticism of any single vendor, it is a reminder that resilience is a customer responsibility as much as a provider promise.
The Single-Provider Trap
Many businesses have embraced the cloud without adopting the architecture that makes it resilient. Typical gaps include single region or single availability zone deployments, missing recovery objectives, weak vendor exit planning, untested incident response and disaster recovery, and monitoring that covers on-premises systems but not cloud dependencies.
Accountability Still Lives With You
Cloud reduces capital spend, not accountability. You still own uptime, data protection and recovery outcomes. Clear targets and good design turn shared responsibility into dependable service.
How Tomlinson Solutions Reduces Your Exposure
Our Virtual IT Director model builds resilience into your roadmap with a repeatable standards and alignment approach. We translate cloud architecture patterns into business outcomes: fewer surprises, faster recovery and evidence your auditors and insurers can trust.
Architect for Failure
Design for Multi AZ and multi region on your primary cloud, and use multi cloud only where it adds clear value. We right-size redundancy to your risk and budget.
Define RTO/RPO by Service
Classify applications from Tier 0 to 3 and set recovery targets you can realistically meet, then align tooling and process to those targets.
BCDR You Can Trust
Create runbooks, automate backups, use immutable storage and schedule restore tests. We validate outcomes, not just backup “green ticks”.
Incident Response Readiness
Run table-top exercises, define escalation paths and map stakeholder communications to provider status pages and SLAs so everyone knows who decides and who informs.
Vendor Risk and Exit Planning
Protect portability with clear data export paths, plan for egress costs, segregate identities and check contracts to avoid unpleasant surprises from vendor lock in.
Standards and Alignment Cadence
Use quarterly reviews to score your environment against our control set, track deltas, assign owners and show measurable progress to leadership.
Budget With Foresight
Apply lifecycle planning and cloud cost controls so resilience is funded proactively, not during an outage.
Compliance and Assurance
Produce clear evidence for Cyber Essentials and ISO pathways, as well as insurance questionnaires, presented in plain English.
What To Do This Quarter
Identify your top five critical services and document their RTO/RPO. Confirm their deployment model, including regions, zones and failover paths, and close any gaps. Run a restore test from backup into a different region or account. Implement status and health monitoring that includes cloud dependencies. Draft a concise cloud outage playbook that states who decides, who communicates and what you will switch. Validate contracts for data egress costs, support response times and shared-responsibility clauses.
Our View
Hyperscalers will keep investing and improving, and most SMEs should not abandon them. The smarter move is to pair the convenience of the cloud with a calm, deliberate resilience plan. That is where we help: turning a sprawling tech estate into a standards-driven, business-aligned platform that keeps you operating, even when a big provider has a bad day.
Ready for Support?
If managing cloud resilience feels complex, you are not alone. Partnering with an experienced IT service provider like us makes it simpler and more effective.
Book a no obligation call to find out more.