Thu Dec 25 01:50:00 UTC 2025: Okay, here’s a summary of the text and a rewritten version as a news article:
Summary:
The article discusses how the increasing reliance on cloud services and SaaS platforms has created complex, often unseen dependencies that can cause widespread business disruptions, even in the absence of cyberattacks. The AWS US East 1 outage served as a stark reminder of this vulnerability. Yogs Jayaprakasam, the chief information, technology and digital officer at Deluxe, emphasizes that traditional disaster recovery and cybersecurity approaches need to be unified to address these broader operational resilience challenges. He advocates for detailed dependency mapping, joint cyber and DR exercises that include operational failures, and better coordination between IT, cybersecurity, business continuity, and third-party vendors. He stresses that resilience is more about coordination and process than simply spending more on redundant infrastructure.
News Article:
Cloud Outages Highlight Hidden Dependencies, Demand Unified Resilience Strategies
NEW YORK, NY – A recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that crippled numerous online services, from Atlassian tools to home monitoring systems, has exposed a growing vulnerability facing businesses: the hidden dependencies lurking beneath critical business functions. The incident, while not a cyberattack, served as a wake-up call for CIOs, highlighting the need for a more holistic approach to resilience that goes beyond traditional disaster recovery and cybersecurity measures.
“Even the best technology teams can’t compensate for gaps in scenario planning, coordination, and governance,” says Yogs Jayaprakasam, the chief information, technology and digital officer at Deluxe. He points to a string of cloud outages across major providers in the past year, demonstrating that these incidents are not isolated events.
According to Jayaprakasam, the impact of these operational failures often mirrors that of cyber breaches. “We treated disaster recovery and cyber response like two different problems, but when something like a bad update takes down millions of machines, it behaves exactly like a ransomware event.”
In response, Deluxe has implemented a unified approach called ResilienceONE, focusing on detailed dependency mapping, joint cyber and DR exercises that incorporate operational failures, and improved coordination between IT, cybersecurity, business continuity, and third-party vendors. This includes asking vendors where their applications are running, allowing for better simulation of real-world failure scenarios.
“Once you see which SaaS platforms share the same cloud region, you start to think very differently about how the business comes back online during an outage,” explains Jayaprakasam.
He cautions against solely relying on redundant infrastructure as a solution, arguing that resilience is primarily a coordination challenge. “The real question is whether you have the right contacts, process, and response patterns in place.”
Jayaprakasam also advises CIOs to leverage existing response processes, such as legal and compliance playbooks designed for cyber incidents, and apply them to operational disruptions. The key is to create a holistic, complementary process rather than separate paths.
He acknowledges the difficulty in prioritizing resilience work amidst the allure of cutting-edge initiatives like AI, but emphasizes that reliability is crucial for maintaining credibility. “Your ability to be seen as a strategic partner can be taken away in a second if the systems aren’t available,” he concludes.
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