South Africa, Oct. 23 -- For South African businesses, this incident served as a stark and costly reminder of systemic risk. Even if local operations were hosted in the Africa (Cape Town) region, they were impacted because critical applications, global Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems, as well as necessary third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) tools, often rely on foundational control planes homed in US-EAST-1. The result was widespread paralysis, crippling creative platforms and communications, and halting productivity across the nation's digital workforce.

This outage compels executive leadership to pivot from viewing resilience as a pure IT expenditure to recognising it as a core business continuity and revenue protecti...