Retarus CEO urges review of cloud strategies

The current global service problems at Amazon Web Services (AWS) have once again shown how vulnerable digital value chains can become when central cloud providers fail. Numerous companies worldwide were affected – and are now increasingly questioning their cloud strategies and the degree of their digital dependence.

Against this backdrop, Martin Hager, CEO and founder of Munich-based cloud and communications service provider Retarus, warns against excessive dependence on large providers and calls for greater digital sovereignty:

“The current global outages, triggered by server problems at AWS, ruthlessly expose the dependencies of many digital services: if a central cloud provider fails, entire value chains come to a standstill. Against this backdrop, it is not only legitimate but necessary to critically review cloud strategies. After all, such events are annoying and often hit teams hard, even if they are part of business operations. This makes it all the more important to be well prepared. More and more companies are currently assessing which workloads are best placed where and are incorporating criteria such as criticality, compliance, latency and transparency into their planning. Digital sovereignty is becoming increasingly important in this context. As European security providers are increasingly being taken over by US corporations, dependencies are growing and control over sensitive information and legal standards is coming under pressure. Failures of this magnitude should therefore be carefully evaluated in companies. Once the problems that have arisen have been “digested”, it is important to consistently implement the necessary changes. The goal should be resilient, sovereign and cost-conscious cloud usage with less dependency and more freedom of choice.”

Hager sees the current situation as a wake-up call for IT managers to increase the resilience and independence of their infrastructures. Against the backdrop of increasing consolidation in the cloud and security market, there is growing pressure to review their own strategies for future viability and compliance.