Cable breaks reveal Public Cloud risk in Africa

Only 3 of the 10 cables connecting South Africa are currently operational.?

News24 reported what I believe to be a really serious threat not just to our IT systems, but to our economy https://flip.it/bKOOh5

I was at a banking customer’s premises on the fateful Friday two weeks ago when it seemed the world stood still.?

Probably hardly noticed by the older generation, the digital native generation found themselves cut off from the internet. We all joke how WiFi has now been added to Maslow’s pyramid of needs, but our lives have indubitably become very app centric.

Apart from Vodacom data being non-existent, From a business perspective? the Public Cloud providers were inaccessible. No email, no MS Teams etc. The virtual meeting tools Covid got us hooked on were suddenly just? gone.?The ill-fated meeting was postponed as the remote participants were in the UK and we found ourselves marooned without connectivity.

But wait, I hear you say, aren’t there local instances running of those Public Cloud providers in South Africa? Yes, yes there are. However those local instances are dependent on international instances for some functions. It is almost as if the “control plane” which governs the local “data plane” just stopped. So the architecture does give you faster data access from a latency perspective - AWS and Azure instances now running in South Africa, what it clearly does not do is continue running when the “control plane” overseas is inaccessible. ?

All over the country CIOs and CTOs are in discussions with architects - firstly to quantify the risk, and secondly to mitigate it. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I expect a lot more talk of hybrid cloud in the coming weeks.?

I would love to hear what your experiences were, and what response has been crafted to this?