Benioff says the war destroyed both of Salesforce's UAE backup data centres

A disaster recovery plan names a primary site and a secondary site. Salesforce's secondary for the UAE was a second building in the UAE, and Marc Benioff said both ran through a relationship with Amazon ^[4]. The company was surprised that on the first day of the war "both of those data centers were destroyed", Benioff said ^[5]. That was the whole in-country backup estate, gone in a day ^[15].

Two sites in one country share that country's air defence. In the first week the UAE faced more than a thousand projectiles and drones, and a launch from Iran takes about two minutes to arrive, according to Al Olama ^[12]. Amazon Web Services said this week that it cannot restore its Bahrain region or one UAE zone, six months after the strikes ^[7]. Anything pinned to those locations has had nowhere to fail back to for roughly 180 days ^[14].

Both facilities failed on the same day, and both were bought through the same provider relationship ^[4][5].

The disclosure change lands on buyers. Al Olama told Benioff that data centres have become critical infrastructure and a target, and put it this way: "Unfortunately they're more important than bridges. They're more important than roads. They're more important than tunnels because our whole lives are on these devices that we're using" ^[1][3]. On the fix, he said: "We're not going to promote the locations of data centers for anyone who wants to have any idea to do something with them" ^[8]. He expects most countries will need to change their rules too ^[9]. Published site locations are how a buyer checks that two regions are not within range of the same launches.

Al Olama also said the impact on human lives and on business was zero, and that life in the country is now completely normal ^[10]. He said the UAE intercepted more projectiles than the whole Middle East and Israel combined ^[11]. In the same period one tenant lost both of its backup sites and has waited half a year for a cloud region to come back ^[5][7].

The check that would have caught this is a short list, kept per pair of sites, of the single events that take both at once. A shared country belongs on it. So does a shared provider relationship, since the two UAE sites were procured that way ^[4]. When one item on the list is credible, the pair fails together, and the recovery copy has to sit under a different air defence, a different grid and a different government. Salesforce did that after the fact: it recovered what it could and opened a backup data centre outside the country ^[6].