Undersea Internet cables are becoming political pawns. David Oller – Europa Press – Getty Images
Cloud infrastructure is down today is a phrase that would make any CEO cringe, yet it has been a common occurrence recently. On April 26, an outage caused by fire and exacerbated by water damage disrupted Google’s Cloud service, affecting Western Europe, Japan, India, Indonesia and South Carolina in the United States United This was the second major incident in 2023 after the Microsoft Azure outage on January 25 that prevented millions of users from accessing Outlook and Teams.
One in four IT leaders believe infrastructure outages are the most likely source of disruption for their organization, according to a recent report from Splunky. Such outages cost businesses an estimated $365,000 per hour of downtime. Perhaps most concerning is that half of the organizations surveyed lack a digitally resilient infrastructure designed to fully mitigate or prevent the impact of a cloud service outage.
In the increasingly complex digital age, cloud outages are not only possible, but likely.
The centralized data center problem
All cloud services depend on centralized management and data centers. If these centers experience problems, cloud users across the infrastructure can be impacted. This is actually one of the most common causes of cloud outages. A power outage in these data centers, for example, could impact millions of people.
Another reason for cloud outages is software updates that leave gaps for bugs or malicious players to attack the technology. Cybersecurity is getting more sophisticated, but so are hackers. If cloud service providers’ management systems are attacked, not only will users’ access be restricted, but their cloud data may also be compromised.
Natural disasters cannot be ruled out. Unpredictable and extreme weather conditions have devastated data centers, causing millions of dollars in damage and contributing to cloud outages. Last summer’s heatwaves in Europe saw temperatures of 104.4 degrees Fahrenheit, shutting down data centers at Google and Oracle. Physical hardware for cloud infrastructure must be built to withstand more intense conditions while also meeting sustainability efforts, a tough line to walk.
While many cloud service providers are developing systems to mitigate outages, the key challenge is that a centralized system creates a weakness in cloud services as a whole. Unsurprisingly, concerns about resilience are growing among business leaders and politicians.
The cloud as a political pawn
Censorship laws can fuel cloud outages. Governments are cracking down on tech activity and, in some cases, have blocked cloud platforms that don’t align with a place’s political ideology. For example, China’s Great Firewall censorship means that Google Drive is banned in the country. VPNs to bypass the block are banned.
Export restriction laws are just as problematic for the cloud. GitHub has faced setbacks in Crimea, Syria and Iran due to US trade restrictions that reduce the cloud capabilities of the platforms in these places. While Iran recently restored GitHub operations, developers in Crimea and Syria can only use parts of the service.
In Europe and beyond, businesses have experienced cloud downtime due to attacks on undersea Internet cables. In France, suspected sabotage of undersea cables by a Russian submarine has impacted the United States, Europe and Asia, as cloud service providers have reported increased latency and intermittent service downtime. In Egypt, damaged cables have resulted in temporary disruptions for businesses in Southeast Asia. While no lawsuits have been settled, the event shows the value of submarine cables in geopolitics.
While, according to NATO, the war in Ukraine has led Russia to begin mapping critical underwater infrastructure for a potential attack on undersea cables. With 200 of the 400 cables around the Atlantic and North Sea area deemed critical infrastructure and the ambiguity of responsibility for the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline, clearly, we are entering times of uncertainty over the security of our critical infrastructure.
While the damage to marine cables in the North Sea is much closer to home, the Google Cloud outage since April has caused downtime in Japan, India and Indonesia, showing that the interconnectivity of cloud service providers it has already led to consequences in other regions.
One now very plausible scenario being considered by security experts is the cutting of submarine cables around the island in the event of a conflict, effectively isolating Taiwan from the internet. Building cloud data centers in Taiwan may not be enough to achieve resiliency in the event of partial destruction of critical cloud infrastructure.
As cloud services become increasingly necessary for all functions of a business, businesses need to ensure that their digital infrastructure is resilient and capable of dealing with expected cloud downtime.
Jean-Paul Smets is the CEO of Rapid.Space, a fully open cloud provider offering resilient edge infrastructure and private 5G.
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