Amazon Cognito now supports multi-Region replication, allowing user pool data — including credentials, configurations, and federation settings — to be synchronised to a standby Region in near real-time. This improves authentication resilience by enabling traffic failover during a regional outage without forcing users to re-authenticate. The feature is available as a paid add-on across most major AWS Regions.

Architect’s Take: Review your existing Cognito-based authentication architectures for single-Region dependencies and assess whether the Essentials or Plus tier add-on cost is justified by your RTO/RPO requirements. Ensure your incident response runbooks are updated to include Cognito traffic redirection procedures, and validate that federated identity providers (SAML/OIDC) are accessible from the secondary Region before declaring it ready for failover.

Original advisory: Amazon Cognito now supports multi-Region replication

Commvault is urging organisations to fundamentally rethink their resilience strategies as AI-powered attackers increasingly target backup and recovery infrastructure, leaving victims unable to recover. The warning highlights that traditional backup plans are insufficient if they are not regularly tested under realistic attack conditions. As ransomware operators and AI-assisted threat actors specifically seek out and corrupt backup systems, untested recovery capabilities offer a false sense of security.

Architect’s Take: Conduct adversarial recovery testing — specifically simulate scenarios where backup infrastructure is compromised or unavailable — and ensure immutable, air-gapped backup copies exist outside the blast radius of your primary cloud environment. Review your recovery time objectives against actual tested recovery performance, not theoretical estimates.

Original advisory: Commvault says it’s time to rethink resiliency as AI crooks leave victims in a ‘dark, dead’ state

AWS has added three new execution blocks to Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) Region switch, automating database scaling and failover for Aurora (serverless and provisioned) and Neptune global databases during multi-region failover events. Previously, teams had to manually right-size secondary clusters under incident pressure, adding critical minutes to recovery time. These new blocks remove that manual step, reducing recovery time and human error during regional outages.

Architect’s Take: Review your existing ARC Region switch plans and incorporate the new Aurora and Neptune execution blocks to eliminate manual scaling steps from your runbooks. This is particularly relevant if you run active-passive Aurora global database configurations with scaled-down secondary clusters, as automating right-sizing directly reduces your effective RTO.

Original advisory: ARC Region switch adds Amazon Aurora scaling and Amazon Neptune global database failover

AWS has added three new execution blocks to Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) Region switch, automating database scaling and failover for Aurora (serverless and provisioned) and Neptune global databases during multi-region failover events. Previously, engineers had to manually right-size secondary clusters under incident pressure, adding precious minutes to recovery time. These new blocks remove that manual step, reducing recovery time and human error during outages.

Architect’s Take: Review your existing ARC Region switch runbooks and integrate the new Aurora and Neptune execution blocks to eliminate manual scaling steps from your recovery plans. This is particularly important if you run active-passive Aurora global database configurations with scaled-down secondaries, as automating right-sizing directly reduces your practical RTO and the risk of operator error during a live incident.

Original advisory: ARC Region switch adds Amazon Aurora scaling and Amazon Neptune global database failover