Cyber-attacks dominate headlines, but the October 20, 2025, AWS service disruption is a stark reminder that all forms of IT and cloud service outages can have an outsized impact, and as a result need to be prepared for.

Dependency demands preparedness

Cloud infrastructures offer unprecedented agility, scalability, and speed, but they are not immune to failure. Especially as modern enterprises grow deeply intertwined with hyperscale cloud providers, the potential ripple effects of an outage or breach are massive.  This dependency results in vulnerability. Applications stall, services halt, and digital operations across industries, from banking to healthcare, experience disruption. A single service interruption can cascade into multi-layered disruptions affecting business continuity, customer trust, and regulatory compliance.

Resilience requires more than redundant infrastructure. It demands visibility, governance, and preparedness across data, applications, and identities. At OpenText, we view events like this as catalysts for organizations to re-examine their cyber resilience strategies, ensuring that when outages, breaches, or disruptions occur, operations continue, and data remains secure.

Cyber resilience is built on data security and speed

As outlined in OpenText’s Cyber Risk Primer for 2025, at its core, resilience is the organization’s ability to minimize the likelihood of disruptions, reduce their impact, and recover swiftly. It is the ability to optimize business continuity.

In moments of disruption, data is simultaneously the most valuable and the most vulnerable asset. Organizations must know where sensitive data resides, who can access it, and how it’s protected, across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

This begins with strong data discovery and classification capabilities, to uncover where the most sensitive and mission-critical data exists. Once identified, organizations must protect their data with critical functionalities such as end-to-end encryption, across its lifecycle and across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. They need a unified data security platform that provides visibility and control to ensure that data remains protected, compliant, and available, even when cloud environments falter.

Cyber resilience also necessitates the ability to detect, investigate, and recover from incidents as quickly as possible. Digital forensics and security operations capabilities that leverage AI and automation for real-time threat detection and response help enterprises to maintain control and mitigate disruption to the business, even amid chaos.

The way forward: build resilience by design

The AWS outage underscores a fundamental truth: no cloud provider, no system, and no organization is immune to disruption. Resilient enterprises prepare for the inevitable by embedding resilience across every layer of their digital ecosystem.

To future-proof your operations:

1. Adopt a data-centric security strategy – Protect the data itself, not just the perimeter.
2. Implement continuous monitoring and threat detection – Gain visibility into vulnerabilities before they become incidents.
3. Automate incident response – Reduce human latency in decision-making during crises.
4. Prioritize recovery and business continuity – Align cybersecurity investments with operational resilience goals.

Closing thought

Resilience is not built in the cloud. It’s built into the organization.
At OpenText, we help enterprises strengthen that foundation. From data discovery and protection to automated incident response and forensic recovery, we empower organizations to withstand disruption, safeguard trust, and keep business moving—no matter where the next outage strikes.

Learn more about how OpenText helps global enterprises strengthen cyber resilience and data security.

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