If you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what a severe outage of Internet-based services might be like, this CFO article cites a report that tried to ballpark it:
A cyber incident that takes a top-three cloud-services vendor offline for three to six days would spawn customer financial losses of about $7 billion to $15 billion, according to a report, “Cloud Down,” by Lloyd’s of London and catastrophic risk modeler AIR Worldwide.
Yes, if something were to knock out, say, Amazon Web Services for a few days or weeks or smote the whole operation, things would be bad. Very bad. Catastrophically bad. Horrific. Terrifying. Like, The Walking Dead bad. But I swear to you, regardless of the chaos that would emerge as a result of a significant portion of the cloud going down would pale in comparison to the schadenfreude that male CPAs of a certain age would be swimming in.
First, they’d laugh and point, but then it would turn ugly. They’d don their khaki trousers and blue blazers and hit the streets, promising to be “The Trusted Advisor” you need in this time of darkness. They’d start tent revivals, preaching “Reject the cloud,” telling followers that only true salvation can be found within…your own IT infrastructure. They’d demand that all accountants prepare tax returns by hand and schlep physical ledgers home every night to be placed under lock and key just to be on the safe side. They’d re-introduce BUSINESS FORMAL. Basically, it’d reinvigorate the CPA equivalent of flat-Earthers.
So, I guess what I’m saying is: Lock your shit up, AWS. Nobody needs this.
[CFO]
