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Both were quickly resolved, but the speed at which they caused chaos in the online-offline world in which we now live highlighted just how precarious our digital lives can be. And it began to get people thinking: does the web’s key infrastructure have a problem of over-concentration when it comes to power?
The big three cloud infrastructure providers – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – together hold more than two-thirds of the market . They’ve attained that level of power because of their remarkable uptime. The fact that things go wrong so rarely is a vindication of their ability and reliability. Yet it also means that more and more services are hosted on fewer and fewer servers controlled by fewer companies – so on the rare occasion that something does go wrong, it goes really wrong.
“When one of the major cloud providers experiences an issue, it doesn't just affect one company; it ripples across sectors, services, and even countries,” said Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at Check Point Software. Stewart pointed out that both the AWS and Azure outages looked more like cock-up than conspiracy – certainly the AWS issue was, while the Azure one is still being investigated. Yet “incidents like this highlight how fragile our online infrastructure really is,” he said. “We have become so dependent on a handful of global platforms that one glitch can disrupt everything from banking to travel.”
And those glitches can have meaningful impacts on us all, given that the infrastructure providers are used by companies that collectively have hundreds of millions of users, and span industries, meaning that banks are as likely to go down as video games or government voting systems.
“This was yet another big flashing warning light of the potential peril we face,” Stacy Mitchell, co-director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a US advocacy group promoting local, accountable economies, said in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium . She points out that this was an innocuous set of errors that happened to have catastrophic consequences. But it could become a more cynical ploy by those who seek to control the media and their message if they wanted to. “Imagine, for example, how this concentrated control of critical infrastructure might be wielded by a would-be authoritarian and the tech CEOs eager to curry his favour,” said Mitchell.
How to fix it is another issue – and one that doesn’t have an easy answer. “Sadly, it’s inevitable that if you want to have truly scalable global content distribution, the infrastructure required is so large it will concentrate in those that can afford it,” said Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium . “I’m not sure it will change as few can catch up.”
Even those that are catching up – running in fourth place – are big tech giants of another stripe. Alibaba Cloud remains more than 10 percentage points behind the third-place runner in terms of the cloud industry, but even then, if it could bridge that gap, it’s replacing an American big tech firm with a Chinese one.
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/web-hosting/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/web-hosting/the-webs-infrastructure-has-a-concentration-problem-exposing-us-all-to-crushing-outages-from-aws-and-azure-to-cloudflare-the-perils-of-having-a-centralized-internet-are-being-felt-by-all#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.