When the Cloud Goes Dark: What Every Data Leader Should Know

We expect the cloud to be invisible, always there, always on. But two high-profile outages in October reminded us just how fragile that assumption can be.

AWS’s US-EAST-1 region went down for eight hours, costing businesses an estimated $1 billion in lost productivity. Days later, Microsoft Azure suffered a global outage that disrupted thousands of services.

For many companies, it was a wake-up call. We depend on the cloud for resilience, but that resilience doesn’t come automatically. Even with hybrid or multi-cloud setups, many SaaS applications still run on a single provider. When that provider falters, entire systems can go dark.

There’s a false narrative that enterprises are powerless against cloud concentration risk. The truth is, you have control. Organizations can scale their resilience—adding layers of protection that match business risk, compliance needs, and global reach. The goal is simple: your critical data must stay accessible, even when the cloud isn’t.

Resilience isn’t just about surviving outages—it’s about keeping your business running and your customers confident when others can’t.

How Aon Unified Its Data to Power AI and Future Growth

The same principles of resilience and trust are driving innovation across industries. Consider Aon.

When Aon set out to transform how it serves clients around the world, it faced a familiar challenge: too much data spread across too many systems. Critical information lived in silos—making it harder to deliver timely insights, anticipate client needs, and power next-generation analytics and AI.

By creating a single, trusted view of its data using Reltio Data Cloud, Aon unified hundreds of sources into a real-time foundation that drives agility, collaboration, and personalization.

Today, Aon isn’t just managing data—it’s using it to fuel innovation, strengthen client confidence, and build for the Age of Intelligence.

→ Read the full story in Harvard Business Review.

How Trusted Data Is Helping Banks Fight Financial Crime—and Win

Financial services offer one of the clearest examples of why trusted data matters.

Financial crime costs the global economy up to $2 trillion each year. Yet despite spending $206 billion annually on compliance, banks detect only a fraction of illicit activity.

The problem isn’t just sophisticated criminals—it’s fragmented, inconsistent data that blinds compliance teams to what’s hiding in plain sight.

Disconnected systems lead to false positives, missed threats, and inefficiencies. And as banks adopt agentic AI to automate fraud and AML workflows, poor data quality risks amplifying errors at scale.

With Reltio, financial institutions are unifying scattered data into a trusted, real-time foundation—enabling faster investigations, better risk detection, and stronger compliance.