How frail is our digital world?  Do you ever think about the risk to your business?

The Electric car looks like a great idea. It has all sorts of benefits.  But as is now becoming clear as yet more and cheaper cars come to market it is entirely dependent on some very shaky infrastructure that simply isn’t adequate.

 You can see the same phenomenon happening in the digital world.  Every day brings news of another amazing AI tool, capable of revolutionising life, health, the economy and anything else you can think of.  But like electric vehicles or digital lives are based on some very shaky infrastructure.

Fibre optic cables are responsible for an estimated 97% of all internet traffic, including access for the device you’re probably using to read this post.  They run from continent to continent under the sea, they come ashore on lonely beaches.  They are unprotected.  It is worrying that there are attempts at sabotage but almost more worrying is the fact that they fail from being scraped on undersea mountains and caught up by fishing vessels.  They are easily damaged and when they are the effect is catastrophic.

Because many of them pass through regions where either the weather or the political regimes are hostile, they are not easy to repair. A study published by the Department of Homeland Security in 2017 estimated that 97% of all intercontinental electronic communications took place using undersea fibre optic cables,

Add to that the amount of power and water required to keep an ever-growing number of data centres operating and you have something that looks like a perfect storm.  Choosing between water for humans, water for agriculture and water for our digital lives is not going to be easy.   It’s a problem fraught with conflict and one that will require global attention to solve it in a way that is manageable.

Don’t bank on your digital world continuing to grow.  This is a strategic issue that any infrastructure-based company should be thinking about.