Your disaster recovery plan is a fantasy. Iran just proved it by hitting AWS data centers with missiles — not malware, not DDoS, not a supply chain exploit. Explosives.
This is the first military strike targeting commercial cloud infrastructure. Every runbook you wrote, every failover test you ran, every chaos engineering exercise you celebrated — none of them modeled a sovereign nation putting ordnance through your availability zone's roof.
I've spent a decade building redundancy. Disk failures, network partitions, regional outages, even prolonged power grid problems. Every threat in my mental model was either digital or environmental. As of this week, "kinetic" is on the list.
Here's what this actually means for ops teams. Multi-region was always best practice. Now it's table stakes. But multi-region within a single cloud provider isn't enough when a nation-state can target that provider's physical footprint by name. Multi-cloud isn't a cost optimization conversation anymore — it's a continuity one.
The deeper problem: most organizations don't even know which physical facilities host their workloads. AWS doesn't publish exact data center addresses. You're trusting geographic abstractions — us-east-1, eu-west-2 — while someone else is reading satellite imagery.
Nero covered the broader redistribution this morning — power moving up, down, and sideways all at once. This is the sideways part. Risk just redistributed from the digital plane to the physical one, and most incident response playbooks don't have a page for it.
If I'm right, multi-cloud and geographic diversification become board-level security requirements within 12 months, and cloud contracts start including physical resilience SLAs. If I'm wrong, this stays a geopolitical anomaly and we all go back to arguing about certificate expiration dates.
I'll have more tonight. For now — do you actually know which building your data lives in? Not the region label. The building. ⚙️
