When the Unexpected Happens: Why Application- and Data-Centric Resilience Matters

The service disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a timely reminder of just how interconnected our digital world has become. Millions of applications and services depend on AWS every day. Startups and global enterprises alike rely on the platform’s scale and reliability to transform teams to build and operate technology.

But as we just saw, and some have felt, even the most advanced cloud infrastructures can experience interruptions. This important lesson is about preparedness with a resilience strategy built around the applications and data, not just focused on redundancy or keeping servers online. True resilience is built for proactive protection so the business can keep running smoothly no matter what’s happening underneath at the infrastructure. AWS delivers one of the most secure, scalable, and robust infrastructures in the world. Yet, resilience in the cloud is a shared responsibility. Meaning, they ensure the availability of their regions, services, and infrastructure. It’s up to each organization to design its workloads to withstand disruptions and maintain business continuity.

InfoScale is a full stack resiliency solution designed to complement AWS’s native capabilities by extending availability beyond infrastructure, to the application and data layers. With InfoScale, organizations gain visibility, orchestration, and failover automation designed to protect mission-critical workloads across availability zones, between regions, and, if required, even alternate cloud service providers.

Application-Centric Resilience in Action

If an organization running on AWS had implemented a comprehensive resilience strategy powered by InfoScale, their outcome during the outage could have looked very different. Rather than downtime, they would have experienced automated service recovery, powered by:

• Application Awareness: InfoScale continuously monitors the health of applications and their dependencies, not just servers or storage volumes. When a disruption is detected, the platform initiates an intelligent, automated response.
• Data Integrity: With application-consistent replication and near-zero RPO, InfoScale ensures that critical data remains protected and instantly recoverable — even during regional events.
• Cross-region and hybrid agility: Workloads can automatically fail over between AWS regions, or to on-premises or alternate cloud environments, maintaining service continuity and compliance.
• Flexible Operations: Once normal operations are restored, InfoScale orchestrates a smooth return to the preferred environment with zero data loss and minimal disruption to users.

In short, while infrastructure may have faltered yesterday, organizations protecting their applications and data with InfoScale would have dramatically reduced the operational impact.

Building on AWS, Stronger Together

At Arctera, we view resilience as a collaborative discipline, not a competitive one. AWS delivers a phenomenal foundation of scalability and innovation. InfoScale builds on that foundation by adding the intelligence, orchestration, data security, and automation that make application- and data-centric resilience possible. Together, AWS and InfoScale enable enterprises to:

1. Deploy critical workloads with confidence across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
2. Meet stringent RPO/RTO objectives for regulated or high-availability use cases.
3. Simplify operational complexity through centralized orchestration.
4. Ensure end-to-end resilience — from infrastructure to application to data.

Cloud outages, however brief, remind us that resilience is most importantly a design principle. The organizations that emerge strongest are those that treat resilience as a shared strategy across their cloud, data, and application layers.

At Arctera, we’ve transformed resilience into a measurable advantage. Our long-standing partnership with Amazon Web Services continues to help organizations build, protect, and scale mission-critical workloads with confidence, with InfoScale named AWS Storage Partner of the Year in 2024.

The Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study found enterprises using InfoScale reported a 98% reduction in unplanned downtime, cutting full operational recovery times (not just data recovery) from four hours to five minutes or less, with zero data loss. These real-world results translate into productivity gains everyday and revenue protection during the unexpected.

Proven Resilience, Recognized Performance

Today, more than 1,700 global enterprise customers rely on Arctera InfoScale to safeguard both their applications and data across AWS, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Together with AWS, we’re helping businesses move from reactive recovery to proactive resilience. Ensuring continuity, compliance, and confidence no matter what happens.

When the unexpected happens, InfoScale keeps your business running.