Lessons from Terminator Genesis - Cloud hosting

I write this on a long haul flight, en-route to arguably the biggest tech conference across the globe. Having cleared down emails ahead of the journey I settled down and plan out 11 hours of on-board entertainment. As a new father I sadly miss a lot (all) of cinema these days so I jumped at the opportunity to catchup on the latest rehash of 'Arnies' finest hour.

For those that missed the latest instalment in the franchise, the general synopsis is that the timeline from the original movie has been altered by Skynet in an attempt to thwart humanity and ending a very profitable franchise. Kyle Reece travels back in time and finds that the 1980's are not as expected and that Daenerys Targaryen (Stormborn, Queen of the Andals, Kaleesi of the great grass sea, Mother of dragons and breaker of chains) is already preparing herself to fight the resistance against the machines.
After twists, turns, one liners, hi-octane action sequences and an arsenal of nods to past scenes, our mechanical overlords are brought to their knees as Skynets core explodes in an impressive plume of electrostatic flame and CGI glory.

Amidst this, one thing struck me as odd. Skynet, a system decades in the making, produced by thousands of employees (see size of research facility) at an incredible expense (and an extraordinary R&D tax relief), with the scalability to control every digital device across the globe and the power to end humanity as we know it, is hosted on site! Humanities nemesis could be brought offline and rendered completely useless by a power cut or indeed BT OpenReach. To clarify, the end sequence is set back in the present, a time when cloud systems are the norm and always available. Highly scalable systems are not just in use they are expected as standard by users.
So what can we learn from this you ask?

- "Always host your master weapons in the cloud. Add reliability by running across multiple regions and build for worst case"

To enslave humanity you need to first introduce multi site availability, auto fail-over, mirroring of data and of course automating backups (just in case). This way Skynet can continue to run even after having half of its buildings blown up by the resistance. When your web servers are designed for disposal, automatically recycled and re generated as needed, then your system can begin to fight back against any threat to downtime.
Moving to the cloud shouldn't be a scary prospect for businesses of any size, good or evil. The real fear is in the risks of loss of data and service disruption which can be caused by attempting to host critical systems on site. The tools to do this are out there and they are becoming easier to implement day by day. Cloud hosting platforms such as AWS and Azure are well documented with great communities and more cost effective and accessible than ever. There are so many resources and tools available to give peace of mind that your cloud infrastructure is solid and reliable. You can even mock server disruption with tools such as Netflix Chaos Monkey to prepare your systems for worst case scenarios in your hosting environment.

When planning global domination, don't leave these things to chance. Look to the cloud and the world can be yours.