9 At a small neighborhood pizza shop, a handwritten sign hangs on the door:“Closed. Due to the AWS outage, we can’t process transactions securely or guarantee your order will go through.” They don’t run data centers or manage AI models; they just need to take orders and charge credit cards. But when one cloud region failed, their point-of-sale system went down with it. It’s a simple picture of a much larger IT issue: when everything depends on one provider, downtime doesn’t stay in the datacenter; it ripples into everyday businesses and revenue. As if the AWS outage wasn’t eye-opening and widespread enough, Microsoft Azure suffered a similar event just a week later, generating more than 18,000 global outage reports. Not due to hardware failures or criminal attacks. Configuration and control-plane issues — the kind that should be routine, not service-halting — were the culprit. The effects reached airlines, retailers, banks, government services, and SaaS platforms. For small and mid-size businesses, they hit even harder because there’s less cushion and fewer fail-safes when the cloud stumbles. When the cloud hiccups, SMBs feel the full shock Large enterprises have redundant infrastructure and teams dedicated to resilience. Most SMBs don’t. So when the cloud hiccups, the impact lands harder and faster. If backups, SaaS data, or recovery systems all sit in the same cloud, even a short outage can halt operations. Rather than abandoning the public cloud, the smarter move is deciding which data belongs there and which should stay close to home. That’s where hybrid backup comes in, blending cloud agility with on-prem resilience so recovery stays fast, local, and reliable. Why hybrid backup matters for ensuring uptime Many IT teams rely on one cloud for both production and protection. If that cloud slows or becomes unreachable, recovery slows too. A safety net tied to the same anchor point can’t catch you when it fails. That’s how recovery-time and recovery-point objectives (RTO/RPO) collapse during outages. Keeping all data in one place removes the independence those metrics rely on. Hybrid backup fixes that. With one copy in the cloud and another on-prem, IT regains control over access, cost, and speed. Pairing cloud services with independent on-prem storage provides fast local restores, ransomware-resilient protection, and fewer delays when cloud services stall. SMBs face the same threats, with far fewer resources Mid-market organizations face the same cyber risks, compliance demands, and uptime expectations as global enterprises, but with leaner teams and tighter budgets. That makes simplicity and control essential, not optional. Technologies once reserved for large data centers are now within reach. Modern object storage brings enterprise-grade resilience without enterprise-grade cost or complexity. And the concern is real: 73 percent of IT leaders say a major cloud outage would be catastrophic for their business. Hybrid architecture directly reduces that risk. How to build resilience you can own There’s no getting around it: outages happen. What matters is how ready you are and how quickly you can bounce back. True resilience starts with control, and choosing the right foundation makes that control real. When your data lives in systems you manage and can reach even when upstream services fail, recovery stays in your hands. To build that foundation, look for storage solutions that offer: True S3-native architecture for performance and reliability, not just a bolted-on interface. Proven scale and API support matter more than labels. Broad backup software support so you can keep using the tools you already trust. Built-in immutability to protect backups from ransomware and accidental deletion. Fast local recovery when the cloud is slow or offline. Scalable, software-defined design that expands on demand without downtime or complexity. Transparent pricing with no hidden egress fees or unpredictable retrieval costs. Building on that foundation means balancing cloud agility with ownership. The public cloud still plays a vital role, but control over your data is what turns disruption into recovery. SMBs deserve the same business continuity that the largest enterprises take for granted. Hybrid backup and independent data control create that foundation. After back-to-back hyperscaler outages, keeping a local copy feels less like old-fashioned IT and more like common sense. And it’s smart insurance for the next outage — because there will always be a next one. Ready to explore what that looks like in practice? Since 2009, Scality has helped organizations of every size, from lean IT teams to global enterprises, build hybrid backup architectures that blend cloud agility with on-prem control for fast, local recovery. By pairing S3-native object storage, such as Scality ARTESCA on their hardware of choice, with leading backup platforms like Veeam, Commvault, or Veritas, they achieve simple operations, ransomware-proof immutability, and recovery that doesn’t depend on a cloud provider’s uptime. Here’s what that architecture delivers: Up to 4–8x faster restores compared to scale-out NAS and cloud-only options Short- and long-term data retention without performance penalties S3 Object Lock + 256-bit encryption for unbreakable, ransomware-resilient backups When the cloud slows or stalls, this design keeps your data recoverable, your operations online, and your team in control. Explore more Learn about hybrid backup with Scality Book a demo to see Scality solutions in action Try Scality ARTESCA for free
