When one cloud region goes down, it shouldn’t take your business with it. This post looks at what the October 2025 AWS outage taught us about hybrid cloud strategy: where colocation still earns its place next to public cloud, what a hybrid setup looks like when a region fails, and what your disaster recovery plan needs to cover before the next outage.
Updated January 2, 2026
On October 20, 2025, the cloud world got a wake-up call. Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region — one of the busiest and most relied upon in the world — went offline for hours due to DNS resolution issues.
If you want AWS’s own real-time view when something breaks, check the AWS Service Health Dashboard
The Hidden Risk of Going All-In on One Cloud
Public cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud transformed how IT scales. But outages still happen — and when they do, your entire stack may go down. The point of a hybrid strategy is simple: keep critical operations running when a region degrades.
Common challenges include:
- Vendor lock-in: Moving workloads between providers can be difficult and expensive.
- Unpredictable costs: Egress fees and dynamic pricing complicate budgeting.
- Limited control: You’re subject to provider policies, maintenance windows, and infra decisions.
When you rely 100% on a single cloud, you also inherit 100% of its risk.
Colocation vs Public Cloud: Why Colocation Is Making a Comeback
In the push to go cloud-first, many teams gave up their physical infrastructure. With availability and cost pressure mounting, colocation is back on the table because it adds control, predictable spend and carrier-neutral connectivity.
Colocation lets you place your servers and network gear in a third-party facility that delivers power, cooling, physical security, and multi-carrier connectivity. For a lot of companies, it’s the piece that makes a hybrid design hold up.
The benefits are real:
- Resilience & redundancy: Dual power, UPS, generators, redundant cooling, multi-carrier transit.
- Flexibility & control: You own and manage the stack while peering with multiple clouds and ISPs.
- Predictable cost: Flat rates for space, power, and bandwidth — fewer surprise egress bills.
- Performance: Choose facilities near users or key hubs to reduce latency.
- Security & compliance: Enterprise-grade controls aligned to SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS.
- Disaster recovery: Multi-site options enable geo-redundancy and faster recovery.
Moving equipment into a colocation facility is a project of its own. We cover the planning, move and eventual decommissioning in our look at the full data center lifecycle.
Why a Hybrid Strategy Holds Up Better
The goal isn’t to abandon the cloud. It’s to balance it: keep core systems stable on infrastructure you control, and use cloud where you need elasticity. Seen that way, colocation versus public cloud is a design decision, not a debate.
For framework-level guidance, the AWS Well-Architected Reliability Pillar is a good reference.
- Run core apps in colocation for high availability
- Leverage cloud for elastic workloads
- Use multi-cloud to reduce regional/provider dependency
- Back up SaaS and cloud data to independent targets
IT Disaster Recovery Planning: What to Build Before the Next Outage
Good IT disaster recovery planning is what turns an outage into an inconvenience instead of a crisis. The plan should be written down, tested and tied to named owners, not left as tribal knowledge.
- DR strategy: RTO/RPO targets by application (what must come back first)
- Backup and recovery: separate targets + immutability where possible
- Failover solutions: runbooks, automation, and validation steps
- Business continuity IT: communications + decision tree during incidents
- Ransomware resilience: protect identity, backups, and admin pathways
Where HTG Fits
HTG designs, deploys, and manages environments that align with business goals — not vendor limits. If you’re looking at managed IT and cybersecurity services as part of a hybrid approach, the real win is clarity: one team accountable for uptime, security controls, monitoring, and lifecycle execution.
We support hybrid environments through day-to-day operations, hybrid design, and security governance.
Want a hybrid design that survives outages?
If you’re weighing colocation against public cloud, we can help you map a hybrid plan with clear owners, clean failover and a disaster recovery plan that has been tested, then run it day to day.
Contact HTG Explore Cloud & InfrastructureFAQ: Cloud Outages, Colocation & Hybrid IT
How does colocation reduce the impact of cloud outages?
Colocation gives you independent power, cooling, and network paths so critical services can run even when a public cloud region is degraded. Paired with multi-cloud redundancy and off-cloud backups, you reduce single points of failure.
Do I have to move everything out of the cloud to get hybrid benefits?
No. Most organizations keep elastic or cloud-native workloads in public cloud and anchor core, latency-sensitive, or regulated workloads in colo for control and predictability.
Can HTG help with migration and ongoing operations?
Yes. HTG handles assessment, design, procurement, deployment, monitoring, security, and lifecycle management across cloud, colocation, and on-prem environments.