Rachel Ler, Area Vice President of Asia at

Fastly, makes the case for multi-cloud architecture as APAC organisations face mounting pressure from outages, regulation and expanding

AI workloads. She explains why resilience must now be treated as a strategic priority. nterprises across Asia-Pacific

( APAC) are more reliant than ever on cloud platforms. However, the push to scale AI models, modernise legacy systems and deliver increasingly sophisticated digital experiences, has shone a spotlight on a growing fragility.

Whenever a major cloud provider suffers an outage, the effects are immediate: stalled applications, impaired services and tangible financial loss. What once felt like a hypothetical scenario now appears as regular operational disruption. In fact, a study by Expereo commissioned by IDC InfoBrief found that more than half of APAC organisations reported revenue losses exceeding US $ 5 million in the past year due to outages or poor network performance.

This picture is perhaps most starkly apparent in Singapore, where over 80 % of eligible systems have migrated to the Government on Commercial Cloud( GCC). At the same time, new advisory guidelines will place more stringent requirements on security and resilience for cloud services and data centres, reflecting rising cyber and service disruption risks globally. Meanwhile, the AI Cloud Takeoff programme aims to equip hundreds of companies with AI capabilities, increasing the intensity and criticality of cloud use. Finally, Smart Nation 2.0’ s Trust in Digital Services pillar and the forthcoming Digital Infrastructure Act reinforce the importance of safeguarding essential digital systems.

These developments will drive up expectations of the underlying digital infrastructure, bringing to the fore security, cost efficiency and scalability. With reliability being woven into policy frameworks as much as into architecture diagrams, digital services cannot falter as the impact extends beyond a single platform – affecting customers, supply chains and public trust.

The risk of overreliance on a single cloud

In this context, the drawbacks of depending on a single cloud provider have become increasingly evident. Each major outage reveals

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