Cloud Resilience Is Assumed. That's the Problem.

How Cloud Changed Failure, Not Accountability

In my frequent conversations with bank and credit union CEOs and CIOs, resiliency and outages have become recurring topics. The incidents vary—AWS, Azure, core processing partners—but the underlying tension remains consistent: when critical infrastructure fails, who is responsible when systems go down?

The answer is more complicated than most vendor contracts suggest.

For banks and credit unions, resilience has never been optional. Financial institutions were designed for failure long before the adoption of cloud technology, with redundant facilities and disaster recovery sites, and they were subject to regulatory exams that tested leadership credibility. The cloud did not introduce resilience; rather, it transformed how resilience is engineered, and it clarified ownership.

Recent high-profile outages have made that ownership harder to ignore. What has changed is the scale, speed, and visibility of failures, along with the expectation that executives can clearly explain to regulators, boards, and customers what broke and how it will be or has been fixed.

Cloud Changed Where Failure Lives

The move to cloud platforms represented a significant upgrade. Secondary facilities, which were expensive and rarely tested or leveraged, were replaced. Manual failover processes and recovery plans that appeared solid on paper but performed differently under stress were common. The cloud changed this baseline by providing automated recovery, managed replication, and adaptive infrastructure.

That improvement is real, but the cloud has also changed where failure lives, and that distinction matters.

Large-scale disruptions have been a part of the cloud era from the very beginning. Despite different providers and eras, the same underlying dynamics persist: hidden dependencies create concentration risks; partial failures are often more complicated to manage than total outages; automation accelerates both recovery and errors; and recovery assumptions are frequently untested until they are needed most.

When Third Parties Fail, You Still Own It

In early 2025, FIS experienced an outage that disrupted services across multiple institutions due to a power failure at one of its facilities. It was not caused by a cyberattack or an issue with a cloud provider. However, customers were unable to access critical banking and payment services, prompting regulators to demand explanations.

The lesson is clear: outsourcing infrastructure—whether to cloud providers or core processors— does not transfer the responsibility for resilience.

Here's a persistent misconception: Isn't this the provider's problem?

Only partially. Cloud providers are responsible for platform resilience, while financial institutions remain accountable for their systems, data, and services running on those platforms. This accountability includes architectural decisions, recovery objectives related to customer and regulatory impact, operational readiness, and governance over how changes are implemented.

This is what boards and CEOs increasingly expect from infrastructure leaders: not only uptime metrics but also clear accountability when assumptions fail.

I see this play out directly in our executive search work at Purple Gold Partners, where infrastructure and cloud leadership roles are increasingly defined not only by modernization, but also by ownership of resiliency and the ability to clearly explain failures to boards and regulators.

What's Actually Working

The institutions making progress are not treating resilience solely as an infrastructure problem. Instead, they are developing it as an organizational capability, often enhanced by expertise they don't have in-house.

Three distinct patterns stand out:

Designing for realistic failure rather than perfect uptime. Multi-region architectures. Automated failover systems tested under actual load. Monitoring that catches degraded performance before total failure.

Making resilience an ongoing process, not just an annual event. Testing that simulates real failures, not scripted disaster recovery exercises. Dependency mapping that evolves with architecture changes. Knowing precisely what fails when a specific service degrades, and having a tested playbook prepared.

Partnering strategically to bridge capability gaps. Many institutions lack deep cloud architecture expertise on staff. They collaborate with partners who specialize in banking modernization to assess resilience, design resilient architectures, implement proven practices, and build internal capabilities through embedded coaching. This approach accelerates progress that would otherwise take years to achieve organically.

The institutions seeing results approach this as a transformation, involving executive sponsorship and cross-functional collaboration, rather than merely treating it as an IT project.

What a Resiliency Assessment Actually Looks Like

Many executives will rightly say they have already assessed their resiliency. What these leaders are often reacting to is not assessment fatigue but rather assessment outputs that stop at scoring and documentation instead of driving decisions.  What leaders truly want and need is clarity they can confidently defend before regulators, boards, and audit committees.

The difference lies in execution clarity, not in audit volume.

We sought a partner who could help institutions address this systematically. Ippon Technologies’ Resiliency Assessment provides a structured approach to transitioning from assumed resilience to verified resilience.

Their framework integrates existing Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK) into AWS Resilience Hub, establishing a measurable baseline of the current resilience posture. The assessment evaluates multi-AZ and multi-region readiness, backup, disaster recovery posture, and failure modes—quantifying risks and blast radius exposure in terminology that boards and regulators can understand. The outcome includes an executive dashboard with live resilience scores and a practical 30/60/90-day roadmap for sustainable improvement.

As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner with extensive experience in financial services, Ippon offers proven expertise in resilience engineering and AWS Well-Architected best practices. Their approach makes resilience understandable, measurable, and operational—precisely what institutions need when addressing questions from boards and regulators about the consequences of critical dependency failures.

The Real Question

The most important question for executives is not whether they are in the cloud.

It's what happens when a critical dependency degrades rather than fails. How quickly is the impact detected? Which recovery assumptions have been tested? And can resilience be clearly explained to regulators, boards, and customers?

Increasingly, these questions are not abstract; they shape leadership credibility, influence board confidence, and determine which executives are trusted to lead through the next disruption rather than merely explain the last one.

Institutions that can answer these questions are well-positioned for the next disruption, whenever it comes.

Cloud platforms provide extraordinary resilience capabilities. However, resilience has always been the result of intentional design, rigorous testing, and operational maturity. For banks and credit unions, this reality is non-negotiable.

Cloud gives you the tools; resilience remains your responsibility.

PGP + Ippon Partnership

Ippon Technologies and Purple Gold Partners (PGP) have formed a strategic partnership to help banks and insurers accelerate complex transformation by uniting leadership, talent, and technology. By combining PGP’s expertise in sourcing and advising executive, product, and technology leaders with Ippon’s deep capabilities in digital modernization, cloud, data, and AI, the partnership delivers end-to-end solutions that align C‑suite vision with scalable engineering execution. Together, Ippon and PGP help financial institutions break through transformation roadblocks, strengthen regulatory and risk postures, and turn technology investments into measurable business impact.