Episode 345

We joke that DR is for natural disasters — floods, fires, storms. But losing 2 Availability Zones in the UAE and 1 in Bahrain qualifies as an actual Disaster Recovery event.

Reports confirm these were drone and missile strikes, and Iran’s IRGC explicitly cited the datacenters’ role in supporting military and intelligence operations as justification. This wasn’t opportunistic — Iran had pre-planned retaliatory target lists, and critical infrastructure including datacenters were on them. The implications for cloud infrastructure are significant. Datacenters running AI models on behalf of nation states are now credible military targets, and that changes the calculus for everyone.

Layered on top of that is a decade of unresolved data sovereignty tension. Safe Harbor was struck down in 2015, replaced by Privacy Shield, which was struck down in 2020, replaced by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework in 2023 — which only narrowly survived a legal challenge in September 2025 and remains far from settled. Between physical security threats and jurisdictional uncertainty that just won’t quit, the question of where your data lives — and whether it’s safe there — just got a lot more urgent.