Identity and access management is often described as the foundation of modern cloud security. But what happens when that foundation itself becomes unavailable?

In October 2025, a prolonged outage in AWS’s us-east-1 region triggered cascading failures across critical control-plane services—including IAM, STS, DynamoDB, Route 53, and EC2—resulting in widespread authentication failures, stalled deployments, and blocked disaster-recovery efforts across multiple regions. For many organizations, identity systems designed to protect availability became a single point of failure.

This session examines what went wrong during the outage and why globally distributed workloads were still impacted by region-level control-plane dependencies. Using the incident as a case study, the speakers will unpack the often-hidden assumptions cloud architectures make about identity availability and how those assumptions break down during large-scale disruptions.

Attendees will learn practical strategies for designing identity-aware resilience, including approaches for maintaining access during IAM and STS outages, managing security operations when control planes are degraded, and building disaster-recovery architectures that account for identity, DNS, and provisioning dependencies. The session will also explore how emerging AI-driven techniques—such as dependency mapping, predictive monitoring, and autonomous failover orchestration—can help organizations move beyond static DR playbooks toward more adaptive and resilient identity architectures.

Key takeaways include:

• How control-plane and identity dependencies can undermine global availability
• Design patterns for maintaining authentication, authorization, and recovery during outages
• Practical DR strategies for IAM, DNS, and cross-region operations
• Where AI and AIOps can realistically improve resilience—and where they can’t

Who should attend: Identity and security architects, IAM engineers, cloud and DevSecOps practitioners, AWS professionals focused on reliability and disaster recovery, and security leaders responsible for continuity and risk management.