Mar 2026

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Over 90% of enterprises operating today use cloud computing in some way, and 97% of IT decision makers intend to expand their organization’s use of cloud computing. However, many of these enterprises rely on a single provider for cloud services. This creates a single point of failure for their digital infrastructure, a significant vulnerability. Outages, such as the 10/20/25 AWS outage, can have knock-on effects on many services. This is why enterprises benefit from maintaining reliable alternatives to cloud computing for critical day-to-day operations.

Provider-level redundancy is no guarantee of uptime–no one system is immune to failure. The AWS outages demonstrate that “cloud-native” status is not inherently “resilient”.

On-prem services can serve as co-equal “partners” for cloud-based services, or simply as a failover option in the event of an outage or other technical issue. It’s impossible to entirely engineer away risk, and since no cloud service has perfect uptime, regardless of how large it is, the most resilient organizations insure themselves against failure with a variety of measures including phased rollouts and auto-rollback capabilities.

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Issues of cloud reliability

Hyperscale providers of cloud services tend to have reputations for high availability, but unfortunately with greater size and complexity comes a greater risk of failure. Cloud redundancy mitigates but doesn’t eliminate risk: the cloud simply offers tools to create resilience. Each enterprise bears responsibility for using those tools to fashion a system that features resilience and continuity. Over-reliance on a single region for cloud services is a failure on the part of that enterprise more than a fault of the provider, which cannot solve all problems. 99.9% and even 99.99% reliability acknowledges that there will be outages, and each organization must temper their provider’s infrastructure with workload architecture and workload distribution to get closer to that elusive 100%.

Kingston is addressing the growing trend by organizations to bring back some or all their server workloads on-prem by offering a line of data center SSDs for both NVMe and SATA based servers. Kingston's DC3000ME PCIe 5.0 U.2 SSD is a high-speed NVMe SSD ideal for high-demand workloads like edge computing, AI, HPC, OLTP, and cloud applications, designed with hyperscale data centers and cloud service providers in mind. Its AES 256-bit encryption and hardware-based power loss protection, along with low-latency performance and I/O consistency offer iron-clad reassurance for your cloud computing backup system.

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A SATA alternative to the DC3000ME is the DC600M series. Designed for mixed-use workloads, it too features hardware-based PLP, and the DC600ME is available with AES 256-bit encryption.

Both options provide viable on-prem, reliable alternatives to cloud computing. With Kingston’s purpose-made enterprise drives supporting your organization’s operations, you can have reliable alternatives to cloud computing that keep you in business while other businesses let you down.

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