The recent global IT outage experienced by a major cloud hyperscaler was a disruptive, real-world reminder that downtime and service disruptions are inevitable. The event impacted services across banking, retail, and healthcare, and served as a powerful warning that relying on any single provider, or even a single cloud region, creates a critical business vulnerability.
This outage highlights the critical risk of a single-provider strategy, rather than an inherent problem with the cloud. It’s the clearest example yet of why a hybrid cloud strategy—one that gives you the freedom to move data and AI workloads between clouds and data centers—must include multi-cloud capabilities.
This is why Cloudera's “anywhere cloud" approach is the clear choice for organizations looking to ensure business continuity. When we say "data anywhere," we mean it: in your data centers, at the edge, and across multiple public clouds.
Hybrid is the Foundation for Freedom
For years, Cloudera has championed a hybrid cloud strategy as the foundation for enterprise freedom. We believe that you should have the flexibility to run your data and AI workloads where it makes the most sense for your business—whether that’s in your own data centers, in a public cloud, or at the edge—and the choice to move them as needed depending on changing business imperatives.
The goal of hybrid is to deliver a consistent cloud experience anywhere, giving you the agility and scalability of the public cloud while maintaining the security and control of your private cloud. This approach is designed to give enterprises the freedom to move data and AI workloads between clouds and data centers, without friction or vendor lock-in. This freedom from infrastructure lock-in is the core of a resilient architecture.
The Key: Hybrid Includes Multi-Cloud for Resilience
While this hybrid foundation provides crucial freedom and choice, the recent outage exposed a critical blind spot in many hybrid strategies: if your architecture simply connects your data center to a single public cloud provider, you’re still dangerously exposed. You’ve merely swapped one single point of failure for another.
As we discussed in our last post, true resilience is about eliminating single points of failure. A modern hybrid strategy, therefore, must be a multi-cloud strategy. Achieving true business continuity means having the freedom to “failover anywhere.” This capability must go beyond a simple on-premises-to-cloud connection to include failover between cloud regions, back to your data center, and critically, from one cloud provider to another.
How Cloudera's Cloud Anywhere Platform Makes This a Reality
On paper, a multi-cloud failover strategy is the obvious answer. In reality, it’s incredibly complex. Different cloud providers have different APIs, data services, and security models. For most organizations, moving a mission-critical data workload from one cloud to another would require a painful, time-consuming effort to refactor applications, re-architect security policies, and migrate data.
Reducing this complexity is precisely the problem our platform was built to solve. Cloudera’s cloud anywhere platform enables a true "failover anywhere" strategy by providing two essential, unique capabilities:
A consistent, portable platform: Our open data lakehouse and portable data services run identically everywhere. We provide a consistent "write-one, run-anywhere" data and AI platform that runs on any cloud, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as in your private data center. This eliminates the need to refactor applications or workloads when moving between different infrastructures, giving you true portability and eliminating infrastructure dependency.
A unified data fabric with replication: A workload encompasses more than data; it also includes the security and governance that must travel with it. Our Unified Data Fabric, powered by Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX), ensures that critical metadata, security, and governance policies are consistent everywhere. Capabilities like Cloudera Octopai Data Lineage provide deep metadata management and lineage, which is also critical context for a failover scenario. Our Replication Manager then replicates both the data and its critical context, which includes metadata and policies, to another environment.
This combination makes the multi-cloud resilience scenario a practical reality. You can run your primary workloads on one cloud provider while using Replication Manager to maintain a synchronized, secondary environment on a completely different cloud provider. When an outage strikes your primary provider, you can quickly promote the secondary environment, ensuring business continuity with minimal data loss (recovery point objective, or RPO) and minimal downtime (recovery time objective, or RTO).
Your Hybrid Strategy Must Be Multi-Cloud Ready
The recent outage should be treated as a drill. It was a test of every organization's resilience strategy, and it exposed a common, critical vulnerability: single-provider dependency. A hybrid architecture is the right foundation for the modern enterprise, but if your strategy has a single-provider blind spot, it's not truly resilient. Don't wait for the next, inevitable disruption to discover this.
Cloudera provides the true "cloud experience anywhere," giving you the capability to design a resilience plan that can withstand any failure. To learn more about how to build a truly resilient architecture, read our blogs "Architecting for Data Resilience" and “Mastering Multi-Cloud with Cloudera”.
