> potential business lost

My startup's op team had a great discussion today because of this that basically boils down to "if we hit our sales goals, an incident like this a year from now would end our company".

Looks like our plans to start prepping for multi-cloud support will be a higher priority.

> an incident like this a year from now would end our company

I'm genuinely curious, what kind of business are you in that a four hour outage would end the company? High frequency trading or something?

You're in the right ball park- services for traders and brokers in the finance industry. A two hour outage during trading hours would be an extinction level event.

not op, but when i worked in the ticketing business if this happened during a big on sale we would get hosed.

A low-cost first step is enabling cross-region replication [1].

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/crr.html

I'd be willing to bet that the effort you put into a multi-cloud solution will be more expensive than you think, and far more brittle in the event of an emergency. It always is.

You're not wrong, but if your customers can't afford an outage, you can't afford not having a fallback plan. Probably worth a few trial runs during low volume hours to be sure.