Last Monday, the world held its breath. Airbnb, Reddit, Slack, Fortnite, Roblox… Dozens of services used daily by millions of people became inaccessible for over 15 hours. The cause? An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in its US-East-1 datacenter, located in Virginia.
An Incident Revealing Dangerous Dependency
AWS holds nearly one-third of the global cloud computing market. Together with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, these three American giants concentrate over 65% of global cloud infrastructure. This concentration raises a major strategic question: is it reasonable to entrust all critical infrastructure to a handful of foreign actors?
"This outage highlights the challenges of dependence on foreign-based service providers."
Anatomy of a Cascade Failure
The technical trigger was a DNS (Domain Name System) issue, that invisible "control tower" that guides every Internet request to its destination. Within two hours, AWS resolved this first incident. But the domino effect was already in motion:
- 1DynamoDB (database) affected
- 2EC2 (virtual servers) paralyzed by ricochet
- 3Load Balancers dysfunctional
Result: despite AWS's redundant architecture (40 regions, 3 availability zones per region), the historic US-East-1 datacenter remains a single point of failure for many critical requests.
Moroccan Sovereign Cloud: A Strategic Alternative
Facing these risks, Morocco has chosen digital sovereignty with local and regional partners offering cloud solutions compliant with Moroccan and African regulations.
Why Choose a Sovereign Cloud?
GDPR & Law 09-08 Compliance
Your data stays in Morocco
Optimized Latency
Datacenters in Casablanca and Rabat
Real-time Support
24/7 assistance in French and Arabic
Local Pricing
Prices in MAD, compliant invoices
Our Sovereign Cloud partners with preferential rates
VOID supports its clients in their migration to resilient and sovereign infrastructures, with exclusive offers negotiated with our partners:
- Tier III certified datacenters in Morocco
- Hybrid multi-cloud architectures (Sovereign + AWS/Azure)
- Disaster recovery plans (DRP/BCP)
- Geographically distributed backup
VOID Expertise: Master AWS While Diversifying Risks
For over 10 years, our teams have been designing and optimizing cloud infrastructures for banking institutions, insurance companies and large Moroccan enterprises. Our approach? Hybrid Cloud First.
Our AWS Expertise
Architecture & Provisioning
- ▸Create and configure EC2 (instances, auto-scaling, AMI)
- ▸Deploy RDS (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Aurora) with multi-AZ replication
- ▸Configure VPC, Security Groups, IAM with least privilege principle
Cost Optimization
- ▸CloudWatch monitoring with intelligent alerts
- ▸Right-sizing instances (average 30% reduction)
- ▸Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
- ▸Identify unused resources
Performance & CDN
- ▸Deploy CloudFront for global distribution
- ▸Optimize loading times (<200ms in EMEA)
- ▸Automated cache invalidation
- ▸Brotli/Gzip compression
Security & Compliance
- ▸WAF (Web Application Firewall)
- ▸Certificate Manager for SSL/TLS
- ▸AWS Config + CloudTrail audit
- ▸Automated S3 Glacier backup
Our Recommendation: Hybrid Cloud Architecture
Rather than "all AWS" or "all Sovereign Cloud", we recommend a hybrid approach:
| Workload | Recommended Hosting | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Sensitive data (customers, HR) | Sovereign Cloud Morocco | Compliance with law 09-08 |
| Critical business applications | Sovereign Cloud + AWS Backup | Sovereignty + redundancy |
| CDN & Static Assets | CloudFront (AWS) | Global performance |
| AI/ML Services | AWS SageMaker | Technological maturity |
| Transactional databases | RDS Multi-AZ | High availability |
Client Experience: Moroccan Bank Migration
Client case • Banking sector • 2023
In 2023, we supported a Moroccan fintech in its migration from 100% AWS architecture to a hybrid solution:
Results:
Lessons from the AWS Outage
Diversify providers
Never depend on a single provider
Think sovereignty
Strategic data must remain local
Automate resilience
DRP/BCP tested monthly
Monitor in real-time
Proactive alerts before outages
Train teams
Internal expertise on multiple clouds to guarantee autonomy
What if the next outage affects your services?
The December 2024 AWS outage is not an isolated case. In July 2024, CrowdStrike paralyzed 8.5 million Windows devices. These incidents multiply with market concentration.
The question is no longer "if" but "when" the next outage will occur.
VOID supports you in your Cloud strategy
Whether you're on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or looking for a sovereign solution, our certified cloud architects help you:
- Audit your current infrastructure
- Design a resilient and optimized architecture
- Migrate to a secure hybrid solution
- Train your teams in best practices
- Optimize your cloud costs (average 35% reduction)
