When AWS suffered a widespread outage in its US-EAST-1 region in October, the shockwaves rippled across the global economy. Financial markets, trading platforms, and digital payment systems stalled. Even a few hours of disruption froze billions of dollars in transactions and exposed a hard truth: the cloud’s promise of resilience isn’t a guarantee.
For organizations across every industry that depend on real-time data to power business operations and AI systems, this was a wake-up call. Cloud doesn’t automatically mean continuity. True resilience must be designed, tested, and continuously verified.
The new reality: Resilience is now a regulatory requirement
For years, the cloud has represented agility and scalability. But as enterprises have migrated their most critical systems to hyperscalers, many have discovered that this centralization creates a new form of systemic risk.
Regulators have taken notice. In the U.K., the Bank of England’s SS2/21 directive now mandates that financial institutions develop detailed “stressed exit” plans—proof that they can sustain operations and shift workloads if a major cloud provider fails. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) sets similar expectations across Europe, demanding that businesses reduce “cloud concentration risk” and demonstrate that critical data and systems can survive provider-level failures.
For financial services and other industries where milliseconds matter, these aren’t theoretical exercises—they’re business survival strategies.
The Reltio perspective: Resilience as a continuum, not a checkbox
As Manish Sood, founder and CEO of Reltio, a leading data intelligence solutions provider, explains:
“At Reltio, we’ve made resilience a configurable capability, not a static setting. Every customer can dial up the level of continuity that matches their business risk, compliance requirements, and global footprint.”
That flexibility is what separates Reltio Data Cloud from traditional, single-region SaaS systems. Customers can start with built-in three-availability-zone deployments for foundational fault tolerance, then scale up their resilience profile as their needs evolve:
- Read resilience: Add Reltio Lightspeed™ Data Delivery Network for sub-50 millisecond global data access—replicating reads across geographies to protect against latency or localized disruption.
- Read/write resilience: Move up to Reltio Business Critical Edition (BCE) for cross-region, active-active recovery, delivering <1-hour RPO/RTO and ensuring continuous operations even if a region goes offline.
- Multi-cloud resilience: Extend this same protection across multiple cloud providers, eliminating concentration risk and meeting emerging regulatory standards.
This “dial-up” approach ensures organizations can tailor resilience to the realities of their industry, risk profile, and regulatory environment—without over-engineering or overpaying for capabilities they don’t need yet.
The architectural foundation: Continuity by design
Reltio’s platform isn’t retrofitted for high availability—it’s built for it. Under the hood, those design principles include:
- Active deployments across three availability zones in every region, ensuring no single point of failure.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Defines the maximum acceptable data loss during a disruption. In Reltio Data Cloud, continuous cross-region replication keeps your secondary environment nearly in sync—so you would lose less than one hour of data even in a full regional outage.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Defines how quickly full service can be restored after a disruption. With automated failover and activation of the secondary region, Reltio can recover and resume operations in under one hour, minimizing downtime and business impact.
- Reltio Observability Hub: Provides real-time visibility into tenant health and performance through RED metrics—Rate, Errors, and Duration—allowing customers to monitor API behavior, validate SLAs, and proactively detect anomalies before they impact business operations.
- Open APIs and metadata standards to enable workload portability between cloud environments.
- Automated observability pipelines that provide measurable proof of performance and continuity.
Together, these choices deliver a self-healing, self-scaling foundation that can withstand both infrastructure disruptions and sudden surges in demand. In other words, continuity isn’t an afterthought—it’s embedded in the architecture itself.
Why this matters in the era of AI and real-time business
In an enterprise where AI agents and automation rely on streaming data to make decisions, a few minutes of downtime can cascade into reputational damage, lost revenue, and regulatory exposure.
The AWS incident made that vividly clear. But it also validated what forward-thinking organizations are already doing:
- Diversifying across multiple clouds to reduce dependency.
- Implementing automated failover mechanisms that reroute transactions in real time.
- Ensuring data sovereignty and compliance across geographies.
Reltio customers are already ahead of this curve. They’re using Lightspeed for instantaneous data delivery, BCE for cross-region recovery, and multi-cloud deployments to ensure continuity—even if an entire cloud ecosystem goes dark.
The takeaway: Resilience isn’t about one cloud—it’s about cloud confidence
The AWS outage was a reminder that even the most trusted infrastructure can falter. For enterprises whose operations depend on continuous data flow, the solution isn’t to retreat from the cloud—it’s to architect for independence within it.
Reltio Data Cloud gives organizations the freedom to operate confidently in a multi-cloud world, ensuring that data—and the decisions it powers—remain available, consistent, and compliant no matter what happens behind the scenes.
Because resilience isn’t measured by how fast you recover. It’s measured by whether your business ever stops in the first place.
Ready for the next step?
Cloud resilience is just one part of a larger shift toward data intelligence. Explore how leading organizations are creating trusted, adaptive data foundations in The New Rules of Data Intelligence white paper and other related resources.
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