Ophelia Chang is a risk and governance executive with over 15 years of experience leading enterprise-wide resilience across financial services, private equity, and technology. She currently serves as Director of Risk Management at TAI, where she oversees global risk strategy, operational resilience, and regulatory oversight. She is also the Founder and Executive Director of Women in Risk & Governance Leadership (WRGL), an award-winning nonprofit advancing inclusive leadership through education and community-building. Ophelia serves on multiple boards and advisory committees, bringing a cross-sector lens to governance, risk culture, and strategic oversight. Her expertise spans cybersecurity, ESG, M&A, and third-party risk, with a consistent focus on aligning risk appetite with long-term growth. She holds the CISA and CIA designations, and is ITIL-certified.
When AWS’s US-East-1 region went down on October 19, 2025, the disruption was swift and far-reaching. A DNS error in DynamoDB triggered cascading failures across more than 140 services, including EC2, Lambda, and CloudWatch. The outage impacted everything from retail operations and financial platforms to education portals and internal enterprise systems. Just months earlier, a critical vulnerability in SharePoint exposed sensitive data across sectors, highlighting the fragility of widely adopted collaboration tools.
These events weren’t isolated. They were systemic failures that underscored a deeper truth: our risks are interconnected, and our governance must be too.
Cross-Sector Experience: A Strategic Advantage
Boards traditionally prioritize industry-specific expertise. But in today’s landscape, sectoral silos can be blind spots. Directors with cross-sector experience bring a broader lens — one that recognizes how a technical failure in one domain can cascade across others. They ask different questions, challenge assumptions, and help organizations anticipate risks that conventional models overlook.
A director with experience in digital infrastructure may flag third-party dependencies that others might miss. Someone from a regulated industry may raise concerns about continuity planning or data governance that haven’t yet surfaced. These insights aren’t peripheral — they’re essential to building systemic resilience.
Interdependence is the New Normal
Digital infrastructure is shared. Regulatory shifts are global. Public trust is fragile. In this context, governance must evolve from reactive oversight to proactive stewardship. That means:
- Mapping interdependencies across vendors, platforms, and ecosystems.
- Stress-testing assumptions about resilience and continuity.
- Embedding cross-sector dialogue into board strategy and risk appetite discussions.
Boards that embrace this approach are better equipped to navigate complexity. They move beyond compliance and toward foresight — anticipating not just what could go wrong, but how it might spread.
Conclusion: Governing for a Connected Future
Resilience today requires more than robust controls — it demands perspective. Cross-sector board members bring the foresight to anticipate how risks travel, mutate, and amplify. They help organizations move from reactive governance to proactive stewardship.
In a world where a cloud outage can halt a hospital or a school board, governance must be as interconnected as the systems it oversees. As boards reflect on their composition and strategic priorities, broadening the lens may be one of the most powerful steps toward resilience.