Being a mission critical service provider, BaseN has always emphasized situational awareness of physical and digital assets. Due to increasing cloudification, the latter is more and more difficult as systems become more complex and interdependent.
This week we’ve witnessed several explosions in the gas pipes on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Disrupting energy supplies is an ancient way of global power politics, but this attack also demonstrates exactly how vulnerable undersea assets are.
On the digital front, destroying even a single pipe (sea cable) has massive consequences, as most cables carry wavelengths for multiple providers and resilience is often planned on a virtual plane, due to cost and flexibility reasons.
Questions which mission critical and government service providers must ask themselves are:
1. Can I rely on my cloud provider in case of major international connectivity disruption?
2. How does my cloud provider prioritize my service during emergency?
3. Under what jurisdiction does my cloud provider operate?
4. How much am I willing to invest to ensure my Digital Sovereignty?
5. Who are the true stakeholders of the underlying infrastructure, and what are their motivations during a conflict?
After the fall of Soviet Union, I truly hoped that the international commercial dependence would result more peace and prosperity. To some extent this happened, but apparently storms can still arise. We now have to prepare for a Digital Winter.
//Pasi
