From Cloud Tenant to Data Owner:Why the AWS Outage Makes Data Sovereignty Critical for APAC Financial Services

Connie Tong
12 minutes ago
4 min read

The October 2025 AWS outage has exposed critical vulnerabilities in cloud-dependent financial services. On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a 15-hour DNS outage in US-East-1, lasting approximately 15 hours and paralyzing thousands of websites and applications. For the financial industry, which is highly dependent on digital infrastructure, it was nothing short of a "collective nightmare."

From the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to various banks and payment platforms, business interruption alerts sounded one after another. This was not merely a technical glitch; it was a public warning about the cloud vendor lock-in risks and over-reliance of global financial services on a single infrastructure provider.

When the Cloud Is No Longer Reliable, It's Not Just Revenue You Lose, but 'Sovereignty'

Cloud reliability failures cost financial institutions more than revenue—they lose data sovereignty. On the surface, it's services and revenue. But on a deeper level, it's a company's "Operational Sovereignty" over its core business. For banks and fintech companies, losing control over core infrastructure creates existential compliance and operational risks. Even more alarmingly, according to statistics from Resolve Pay, API downtime increased by 60% between early 2024 and 2025, indicating that system reliability issues are worsening, not improving. When a failure occurs, companies can only wait passively for a third party to implement a fix. This feeling of helplessness exposes the fundamental architectural risk of completely outsourcing the life-and-death power over core systems.

Dual Crisis: Cloud Outage Risks Meet Stricter Data Localization Laws

If the AWS outage was a visible "act of God," then the tightening data regulations across the Asia-Pacific region are an impending compliance "storm." From Singapore and Hong Kong to multiple Southeast Asian nations, financial data residency requirements and cross-border data transfer restrictions are becoming unprecedentedly strict, challenging traditional fintech infrastructure models. The Data Law Trends 2025 report by Freshfields also clearly states that global data localization requirements are significantly increasing corporate compliance complexity. This places financial institutions in a dilemma: on one hand, the public cloud presents centralized operational risks; on the other, using it to meet the data sovereignty requirements of various jurisdictions becomes exceedingly complex, costly, and fraught with compliance traps.

Returning to the 'Ownership' Model: Private Deployment Is a Strategic Imperative

Faced with this dual challenge, what is the way out? The answer lies in a profound architectural regression: not only deploying systems in a controllable, private environment but also ensuring the system itself is no longer an uncontrollable "black box." This demands that the next generation of financial analysis tools must fundamentally embrace openness and sovereignty.

This is precisely the core value of COMPASS, an open Financial Data Analytics (FDA) platform. It is designed as a "Quant Model Enablement Engine," and its strategic cornerstone is Sovereignty: through complete On-premise/private cloud deployment, it enables financial institutions to:

Reclaim Operational Sovereignty: Run the core analytics engine behind their own firewalls, completely eliminating the single-point-of-failure risk of the public cloud and ensuring business continuity.
Master Compliance Sovereignty: Ensure sensitive data and model logic never leave the corporate boundary from start to finish, inherently satisfying the most stringent data residency regulations.

Unlike traditional closed systems, the open nature of COMPASS grants institutions full visibility and control over model architecture, data flows, and decision logic, truly achieving the strategic return from being a cloud "tenant" to a data "owner."

Conclusion

This strategic shift toward digital resilience and cloud risk management has already become a global consensus. A recent survey by Barclays Bank found that a staggering 83% of enterprises are planning to move their workloads from public clouds back to private cloud environments. This trend clearly signals a critical strategic pivot: transforming uncontrollable external risks into controllable, secure, internal core assets.

Ultimately, this is a fundamental choice: in an era where data is the new asset, do you want your core business to be a "tenant" on a cloud platform, constantly facing the risk of eviction due to the "landlord's" problems? Or do you want to become the "owner" of your data, possessing absolute and complete control over your core assets?

Before the next, inevitable "AWS outage" arrives, now is the perfect time to reforge your data strategy.

Ready to Take Control?

The AWS outage exposed the risks of cloud dependency.

Deploy your analytics infrastructure on-premises.

Own your data now

✓ On-site deployment in your data center

✓ Full data sovereignty and control

✓ APAC regulatory compliance built-in

✓ Zero cloud vendor dependency

References

Reuters. (2025, October 20). Amazon's cloud unit reports outage, several websites down.
Resolve Pay. (2025). Statistics Indicating API Downtime's Cost to Finance Operations.
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. (2025). Data law trends 2025.
DataCanopy. (2024). Back to Private Cloud: Why 83% of Enterprises Are Moving Their Workloads.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment or professional advice. Information and views are from public sources we believe to be reliable, but we do not guarantee their accuracy or completeness. Content is subject to change. Readers should exercise their own judgment and consult a professional advisor. Any action taken is at your own risk.