THE CRUNCH
Drone and missile strikes have inflicted unprecedented damage on data centres across Eastern Europe and the Middle East this year, knocking cloud services offline for millions of people and, in some cases, permanently erasing Amazon Web Services customer data. The trend is a new concern not just for Big Tech but for governments and anyone who relies on everyday digital services. To unpack what it means for society's dependence on cloud resilience, Ars Technica is hosting a live conversation titled "Drone attacks and data centers: New Risks for Big Tech" on Tuesday, November 17 at 1 pm ET.
The guest is Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK defence and security think tank, where he leads work on how cloud services factor into national security, defence and tech sovereignty efforts. His research has examined how Ukraine, hit by both cyberattacks and physical strikes when Russia's full-scale invasion began, worked with Western partners to make its cloud systems more resilient, and what that experience suggests for cloud adoption plans at NATO and among European governments.