Enterprise Challenge / 04

CONCENTRATION
RISK

Operational resilience

A single hyperscaler outage or policy change can take a critical workload offline. Boards now expect a credible second-site or exit plan — and the evidence that it's been tested, not just written down.

Symptoms

HOW CONCENTRATION RISK MANIFESTS

No. 01

Single-provider critical workloads

Production runs on a single hyperscaler region with no tested fallback. Architectural diagrams stop at 'us-east-1' or 'australia-southeast1' and the runbook for outages says 'wait'.

No. 02

Account-level kill switches

A single billing dispute, policy violation, or compromised root account can take everything offline. Hyperscalers can — and do — suspend accounts without notice.

No. 03

Cross-service blast radius

Hyperscaler outages cascade across services. An IAM region failure can take down workloads in unrelated regions. The blast radius is often larger than the marketing suggests.

No. 04

Geopolitical and policy risk

Export controls, sanctions, and provider policy changes can affect access to services overnight. Workloads built on AI services especially face this risk in 2026 and beyond.

Approach

HOW WE BUILD RESILIENCE

Sovereign second-site

A documented, tested second-site on sovereign infrastructure. Not 'paper DR' — a working copy with rehearsed failover and known recovery time.

Provider-portable architecture

Workloads designed to move. Kubernetes, Terraform, open-source databases, standards-based storage. Lock-in surfaced and minimised by design.

Tested exit plan

An exit plan that's been exercised, not just written. Rehearsed restore from sovereign backups, documented data flows, and a credible timeline boards and auditors will accept.

Risk register evidence

Documentation suitable for risk committees, regulators (APRA, ASIC), and insurers. Concentration risk addressed with evidence — not 'we have a multi-cloud strategy on the roadmap'.

CAN YOU FAIL OVER TODAY?

We start with a resilience review. Where the concentration is, what the blast radius looks like, and how to build a credible second-site.