On October 19, 2025, widespread disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) revealed an undeniable truth about today’s digital infrastructure: organizations are deeply interconnected. The AWS outage was not simply a matter of one vendor’s technical failure. It triggered a chain reaction across industries, affecting operations, availability, and service to end-users at a global level. The effects highlighted how integrated third-party platforms have become with first-party systems, blurring boundaries and expanding the potential surface for risk.
This incident underscores the need to move beyond siloed approaches to third-party risk management; risk is no longer internal or external, but pervasive and shared. Cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and digital services have become extensions of the enterprise. When one provider falters, the consequences directly impact organizational operations, amplifying the need for a unified risk management approach.
Historically, first-party risk, focusing on internal security, governance, and controls, and third-party risk, concerning vendors and dependencies, were treated as distinct challenges. The AWS outage demonstrated that these borders are porous. When a core provider suffers disruption, the real problem is not just a vendor’s downtime, but the immediate effect on the business itself.
"Concentration risk is a critical challenge in today’s interconnected digital ecosystem. With so many third parties relying on providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, a single outage, like the one we saw recently, can ripple across industries, disrupting services on a massive scale. Organizations that fail to understand and address this risk leave themselves vulnerable to significant operational and reputational impacts,” explained Matt Alderman, CPO of CyberSaint.
Modern cyber risk management requires uniting the oversight of these domains. A mature program offers visibility across all layers of the digital ecosystem, mapping out where dependencies exist and monitoring how external environments can impact internal systems. Real resilience depends on real-time data, not static surveys or spreadsheets. The ability to see how a change in one part of the ecosystem, internal or external, cascades throughout the organization is now foundational.
CyberStrong’s unified first- and third-party risk management platform embodies this unified philosophy. By centralizing risk data and connecting control performance information from both inside the enterprise and its critical service providers, organizations achieve a holistic understanding of their operational landscape. This form of visibility is crucial for managing today’s complex and dynamic risk environments.
Learn more about our automated approach to TPRM here.
The pace and complexity of today’s interconnected systems require more than manual assessments and periodic audits. Automation transforms risk management by delivering continuous, real-time oversight of both internal controls and external relationships.
With automated risk correlation, leveraging AI and telemetry, enterprises can identify where weaknesses in a vendor’s environment intersect with their own control structures. Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM), as enabled by solutions like CyberStrong, harnesses live data feeds from across the technology stack to monitor both first- and third-party controls. This means deviations or threats, whether from a cloud partner or a shift in the internal environment, are rapidly detected, contextualized, and escalated for action.
This automated vigilance ensures the organization's risk register is an up-to-date living system, ready to reflect the realities of a shifting environment. Rather than reacting to incidents after the fact, risk teams can act proactively, making informed decisions that minimize the impact of disruptions before they propagate through the business.
"My immediate reaction was that an overwhelming amount of infrastructure and applications depend on a small group of cloud providers, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, who collectively power most of the world’s cloud computing. This concentration amplifies exposure, as disruptions in their services cascade across countless businesses and industries.
The 15-hour outage we just witnessed underscores the significant operational and financial impact such events can have. These incidents, while disruptive, are not entirely unpredictable. They should be modeled and understood not only by Infosec teams, but also by business leaders, to ensure preparedness.
What we’re doing with TPRM empowers organizations to take a data-driven approach to tracking and mitigating these risks. By proactively addressing vulnerabilities, businesses can enhance their resilience and ensure that events like these don’t come as a surprise," said Padraic O’Reilly, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at CyberSaint.
The central lesson of the AWS outage is not a warning to avoid cloud reliance, but a call to evolve how risk is managed in connected ecosystems. True resilience is rooted in the ability to maintain continuous visibility into the health of both internal operations and external platforms that power them. When cyber risk management combines first- and third-party oversight and leverages automation to identify issues in real-time, organizations are better positioned to absorb shocks, maintain continuity, and protect stakeholder trust.
CyberStrong empowers risk teams to bridge the gap between diverse data sources, streamline oversight, and turn complexity into clarity. In doing so, organizations can adapt to current threats and anticipate future challenges, making cyber risk management not just a compliance function, but a driver of strategic confidence and agility.