26 01732 759725 ASK THE EXPERTS localised incidents from turning into global disruptions.” Dangerous & negligent Jamil Ahmed, Distinguished Engineer at Solace, pioneer of a multi-cloud, eventdriven approach, added his voice to calls for a multi-cloud strategy. He said: “Even as cloud technology evolves, failures within the system will inevitably happen. ‘One-of-a-kind’ extremely rare outages or issues continue to plague every service provider from time to time, which is why the need to store valuable information on multiple provider services, known as an event mesh, has arisen. “From a business perspective, there are no excuses for having a single cloud provider. It’s multi-cloud all the way, treating cloud as commoditised compute, not building apps and services that are tied to knowing what cloud they’re in. Unfortunately, when businesses first introduced the cloud into their strategy about 10 years ago, they made multi-provider usage a problem to solve later on. It is now ‘later on,’ and the strategy of using one cloud service is demonstrably dangerous and negligent. Anyone adopting cloud without thought for multi-cloud on Day 1, should opt into an event mesh system or be fearful for that next ‘extremely rare’ event.” Digital sovereignty Hot on the heels of the AWS outage, problems with Microsoft Azure at the end of October added more grist to the mill. Raphael Auphan, COO at encrypted solutions provider Proton, said: “For the second time in two weeks, we’ve seen a massive portion of the internet taken offline thanks to the mistakes of a solitary tech giant. As if we needed reminding, this is further proof that relying on a handful of major cloud providers creates serious vulnerabilities across the internet and puts whole economies at risk in the process. “Just like the AWS outage, Azure’s latest failure showed how easily the ripples from an outage can spread globally and highlighted the danger of our global dependence on US technology. When the whole world relies on tech from a tiny number of companies from one country, then the whole world is vulnerable. The only answer for the UK, Europe and elsewhere is to prioritise digital sovereignty, in other words to develop their own native services. We need to stand on our own two feet if we’re going to have any chance in the future.” Questions for Government Mark Boost, CEO of UK cloud provider Civo, advocates greater commitment to sovereign cloud, especially by Government and critical infrastructure providers. He said: “We should be asking the obvious question: why are so many critical UK institutions, from HMRC to major banks, dependent on a data centre on the east coast of the US? Sovereignty means having control when incidents like this happen, but too much of ours is currently outsourced to foreign cloud providers. The AWS outage is yet another reminder that when you put all your eggs in one basket, you’re gambling with critical infrastructure. When a single point of failure can take down HMRC, it becomes clear that our reliance on a handful of US tech giants has left core public services dangerously exposed. “The more concentrated our infrastructure becomes, the more fragile and externally governed it is. Europe can’t afford to keep walking a digital tightrope without a safety net. If Europe is serious about digital sovereignty, it needs to accelerate its shift towards domestically governed and diversified infrastructure. Governments and regulators have a responsibility to create the conditions for real competition. That means rethinking procurement, funding sovereign alternatives and making resilience a baseline requirement.” continued... Jamil Ahmed Mark Boost ...continued Douglas Wadkins “Governments and regulators have a responsibility to create the conditions for real competition. That means rethinking procurement, funding sovereign alternatives and making resilience a baseline requirement.” Mark Boost, CEO, Civo
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