Doomsday: The Beginning of the End of Digitization
Elizabeth Bemah A.
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) | Management Systems Auditing| Data Privacy Risk Management | Compliance Auditing | Speaker | Mentor | Trainer
Thursday, 14th March, 2024 was the day about a dozen African countries, including Ghana, experienced severe internet connectivity disruptions that brought a greater number of online activities to a halt.
Except for Google apps and services, access to all other social media apps were down. We couldn’t send messages, check our emails, pay for utility services like water and electricity and neither could we send money to our loved ones.
It was Doomsday for a majority of the populace who rely heavily on the internet, as some remote workers lost their livelihood as a result of their contracts being cancelled.
This unpleasant experience threw my mind back to the days of the 24-hour power planned outages in Ghana that forced many individuals and organizations to procure generators as an alternative supply of electricity.
According to the article published by The Maritime Executive titled ‘Four More Subsea Cables Disrupted Off Africa’, “On Thursday morning, damage to at least four subsea cables along the West Coast of Africa slowed down internet access for a dozen countries, according to service providers and internet traffic analysts.?
The internet customers who were affected most by Thursday's outage were residents of Liberia, who were essentially cut off, according to Cloudflare's data. Cote d'Ivoire also experienced substantial slowdowns, and Gambia, Guinea, Ghana, Benin, Niger, and South Africa saw lesser effects.”
Though Ghana’s situation was recorded as medium, it sure felt like a total outage as the only means of communication was through voice calls. Even text messages and USSD short codes, at a point, took hours to send.
It was in that dire situation that most people realized their heavy dependency on the internet.
As we await a thorough investigation into the exact causes of the subsea cable breaks and for internet connectivity issues to be fully restored, below are key areas that must be of concern to the Ghanaian government and regulators at large, to propel the digitization agenda.
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As a country, we need to start having the conversation around diversifying our internet infrastructure. As it stands now, we’re heavily dependent on subsea cables as the major infrastructure for internet connectivity. This disaster has revealed the importance of having backup infrastructure elsewhere, say in the sky (satellites), to fall on in the event of cable cuts in the sea.
Most companies are embracing cloud storage and hosting applications but maybe we should consider cloud storage with one eye opened. There are so many advantages of the cloud but having physical servers on prem can mean more control over certain occurrences. Organizations could consider deploying to physical servers as their primary location and using the cloud as backup.
As the internet was in the early restoration phase, I realized that preference was given to some social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. I kept on wondering the thoughts that went into that decision. Telecommunication companies have been marked as Critical Services Infrastructure by the Cyber Security Authority. Ideally the criticality of these telcos should mean that they are regulated as to the mission critical systems that are of national interest they need to restore first.
The need for businesses to continue in the face of disasters cannot be overemphasized as it provides alternative routes to serve clients so the business can still go on. In highly competitive industries, not having a plan B to serve clients means these clients will easily move on to the next business that can provide services to them. Amid the internet connectivity crisis, some people and business who needed internet at all costs, resulted to buying AirtelTigo chips and modems so they can still be productive. A remote worker who needed to work to meet stringent deadlines would search for alternative means to get internet connectivity as their livelihood depended on it. For businesses to continue is the more reason why manual set ups shouldn’t be entirely abolished.
This is an area that requires a lot of discipline to attain. Like fire drills, cyber tabletop exercises are necessary as no one wants to be in the midst of an incident or disaster and be clueless as to what to do else, there will be sheer waste of time in solving as issue as it hadn't been rehearsed. Cyber Exercises aren’t a hundred percent guaranteed to solve incidents but most often than not, the preparedness bring guidance, effective collaboration among cross-functional teams and saves the organization time in recovering from the incident.