Jos Poortvliet, Nextcloud:
July 19 saw a CrowdStrike update taking down countless Microsoft systems, disrupting flights, surgeries, banking and more all over the world. The incredible impact this single outage had shows the importance of digital resilience, especially in the public sector. This can only credibly be achieved by decentralization and diversity in infrastructure and technology.
A mono-culture of services delivered by just a handful of big tech firms threatens the continuity of service in case of mistakes, cyber-attacks and political conflicts.
The key to digital resilience is decentralization and heterogeneity. In the end, every IT system will go down at some point. An over-reliance on a single service is thus inevitably a risk. Even if that vendor is ‘too big too fail’ and has tons of redundancy and data centers.
The public sector in particular should be following a focused strategy to differentiate their IT infrastructure, reducing the reliance on a small number of big tech giants.