Cloud region
A geographic grouping of availability zones that forms the real unit of cloud risk concentration, because few workloads ever cross its boundary.
A cloud region is a geographic grouping of availability zones with its own control plane, where a customer deploys data and workloads by default. It is the real unit of risk concentration. Leaving a region means duplicating data, accepting latency and often paying transfer charges, so the vast majority of workloads stay in a single region while their owners believe they are diversified. The law adds its own constraint. Some sector or national data residency rules forbid exactly the diversification that resilience would call for. For an insurer, a region-wide loss is therefore the most credible cloud accumulation scenario. It ranks ahead of a provider-wide global incident, which is more spectacular but rarer and fixed faster. Mapping a portfolio by region, not by provider, is the first step in any honest measurement of the exposure.
On 25 April 2023, water ingress followed by a fire in a battery room took out the europe-west9-a zone of Google Cloud in Paris. The whole region stayed degraded for days and some services were only restored weeks later.
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