The recent AWS outage showed exactly how fragile many organisations’ cloud resilience can be. Over one million UK users experienced service disruption across critical platforms, including with HMRC and Lloyds Bank. While outages of this scale are uncommon, the impact is immediate and hard-hitting – they can lead to blocked access, stalled operations, and urgent decision-making at leadership level. For many businesses, the AWS outage raises questions about whether organisations’ cloud architecture is being intentionally designed to withstand disruption, and what can be done to ensure scenarios of this impact are being avoided in future.
To better understand these solutions, we spoke with Freddie Gander, Senior Cloud Consultant at Hyve, who helps our customers define and implement truly resilient cloud strategies – from initial engagement to ongoing management.
What does true cloud resilience look like?
Freddie Gander, Senior Cloud Consultant at Hyve, defines resilience in cloud hosting as maintaining operational continuity under any circumstances. He explains: “Cloud resilience means keeping everything running, even if there’s a hardware failure, network issue, or human error. The business can continue as usual.”
A resilient strategy can look different depending on each business’s size, budget, and expertise. The critical needs of a multinational financial institution will differ from those of a local accountancy firm for example, but the main objective remains the same – uninterrupted access to services and data.
Resilience in cloud infrastructure encompasses not only uptime, but also the ability to anticipate failures, recover quickly, and maintain performance under pressure. This includes redundant architectures, failover capabilities, automated recovery processes, and continuous/proactive monitoring – all integrated into a strategy which fits the unique requirements of your business.
What are the main risks to resilience?
Several common risks can undermine cloud resilience. Freddie highlights one of the primary risks – single points of failure: “If a business-critical application is running on a single bit of kit, what happens if the server goes down? That’s when the implications become serious.”
However, maintaining resilience in the cloud requires more than just avoiding single points of failure. Your business also faces a range of other risks, as Freddie explains: “There’s always the risk of human error or misconfiguration. Our customers often have different levels of in-house expertise, so to address this skills gap, they rely on our support team and solutions architects to put the right mitigations in place. Weak backup or recovery strategies, and security gaps, are also common challenges we help address.”
Proactively identifying these risks allows your business to build a resilient infrastructure. Redundancy, automated failover, and consistent backup strategies mitigate these vulnerabilities. In addition, regular monitoring, alerts, and rapid response protocols ensure incidents are caught early, reducing the likelihood of significant downtime or data loss in the case of an incident.
The role of automation in maintaining uptime
Automation plays a critical role in modern cloud resilience, allowing systems to self-monitor, recover, and scale with minimal manual intervention. However, even the most sophisticated automated process cannot replace the insight and expertise of experienced engineers.
Freddie says: “Automation is obviously on the up and up. Since it’s going to continue being a big part of modern cloud resilience, we look to automate various processes along each layer of our managed services, from proactive monitoring to automated backups and disaster recovery, but you’ll always have our team of expert engineers available 24/7/365 to support and run that with you.”
Once automation is in place, it actively monitors the health of servers, applications, and network resources around the clock. If a fault occurs, whether a CPU overload, memory leak, or node failure, the system can trigger corrective actions such as restarting services, provisioning additional virtual machines, or rerouting traffic to maintain continuity. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables the entire environment to be redeployed quickly and consistently if a component or site fails. Automated disaster recovery ensures failover to secondary sites, while auto-scaling adjusts compute resources to maintain performance during surges or partial failures.
However, on top of this automation, expert engineers are essential to interpret system behaviour, respond to complex incidents, optimise configurations, and continuously validate that backups, failover processes, and redundancy measures perform effectively under real-world conditions.
Integrating disaster recovery into your resilience strategy
Disaster recovery (DR) is an important part of any resilient cloud strategy, providing a structured approach to maintaining your business continuity when unexpected events occur. Freddie emphasises: “Disaster recovery is about understanding budget, business priorities, and the impact downtime would have. We help our customers put a clear recovery plan in place.”
Effective DR strategies define recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). RTO refers to the maximum amount of time that it takes for services to be restored following a disaster, and RPO refers to the point in the server’s timeline that can be returned to, determined by your tolerance to downtime and data loss. This ensures that mission-critical applications remain operational or are restored rapidly, minimising disruption to your business operations. Learn more in our insight ‘DR: What is RPO and RTO?.’
If your business is in a regulated industry, your DR planning must also incorporate compliance, auditability, and data sovereignty requirements. When integrated with proactive monitoring, automated failover, and reliable backup processes, DR is a robust safety net which protects your business against outages, cyberattacks, and other unexpected disruptions.
Tailoring by business size and solution
Resilience strategies need to be tailored to your organisation’s size, cloud setup, budget, and operational priorities.
As Freddie explains: “Different sized businesses, and businesses with different cloud setups, need different approaches to resilience. We take that into account and guide those conversations, because the level of in-house expertise varies a lot. Larger organisations might have dedicated teams who understand their infrastructure well. Others might rely more on external support to shape the right strategy.”
He also highlights how the impact of downtime and risk tolerance differs depending on the business:
“A large banking institution or payments platform has almost zero tolerance for downtime – the implications are immediate and serious. Whereas for a smaller firm, it’s more about having confidence that if something does happen, systems can be restored quickly. The priorities are different, so the resilience model has to be different too.”
For larger businesses managing complex, multi-regional environments or regulated workloads, resilience often involves multi-layered redundancy, automated failover, and continuous testing. For smaller organisations, resilience may focus on strong backup routines, straightforward failover paths, and proactive monitoring which does not demand large internal teams.
Hybrid and multi-cloud setups also introduce decisions around workload placement, data movement, unified monitoring, and governance. Regardless of your business size or cloud solution though, the same message rings true – resilience must be designed in proportion to your operational needs, risk exposure, and available capacity.
Future trends in cloud resilience
The future of resilience is being largely driven by the growing trend for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies. As more businesses spread their infrastructure across multiple cloud vendors, maintaining resilience is now becoming about ensuring consistency across them.
Freddie highlights that many businesses are running systems across several environments, and resilience depends on ensuring they work together: “A lot of organisations now use a mix of cloud environments and different vendors. The key thing is making sure workflows can move across them smoothly. You don’t want a setup where one system can’t talk to another, or where resilience only exists in one part of your infrastructure.”
Diversifying vendors can strengthen resilience – for example, reducing dependency on a single provider’s regional availability or networking setup – but it also introduces more complexity. Networking, data flow, logging, and recovery plans all have to align, otherwise redundancy will not work in practice.
This is where a managed service provider (MSP) can play an important role. Many businesses simply don’t have the internal expertise or time to build and maintain resilience themselves. If something does go wrong, the value of expert support becomes clear.
Freddie states: “We have the systems, support, and the knowledge to act quickly. We take the weight off, so businesses can focus on running their operations rather than worrying about the infrastructure.”
The next steps
Building resilience requires continuous assessment, improvement, and alignment with your business priorities. The first step is understanding where your organisation currently stands. If you are looking to evaluate the resilience of your current cloud environment, or starting from scratch, we can help you understand where improvements can be made and how to implement them effectively.
For an initial consultation, fill out our contact form and we will be in touch.