Bottom line: Widespread cloud use without adequate risk mitigation makes German companies vulnerable to operational outages and cyberattacks.
German companies and critical infrastructure are heavily invested in cloud services without implementing sufficient redundancies or failure precautions. This creates new attack surfaces for outages and cyber incidents that can paralyze entire industries.
German companies have integrated cloud services extensively into their IT infrastructures. Surveys and industry analyses continuously confirm this trend. This brings with it a structural dependence on cloud providers – coupled with concentrated failure risk if individual providers experience disruptions or are attacked.
For CISOs and risk managers, this creates a dual challenge: on one hand, many organizations lack strategies for business continuity in case of failure. On the other, cloud dependency creates new single points of failure when redundancy and failover mechanisms are not factored in. An outage at a major cloud provider can consequently impact hundreds to thousands of dependent companies simultaneously – as previous public incidents have shown.
In the context of the NIS2 Directive and critical infrastructure, the compliance burden intensifies: operators must demonstrate that cloud dependencies do not result in uncontrolled risks. This requires supplier audits, SLA negotiations, backup strategies, and in the case of critical infrastructure, explicit risk analyses of cloud provider outages.
Source: www.heise.de · Published 3 July 2026
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