Ars Live: Can the cloud survive drone strikes on data centers?

Drone and missile strikes have inflicted unprecedented damage on data centers in Eastern Europe and the Middle East this year, disrupting cloud services for millions of people and permanently deleting some Amazon Web Services customer data. This trend represents a new concern for Big Tech companies—but also for governments and everyone else who depends on common digital services in modern life.

To explore what this all means for modern society’s reliance on cloud resilience, I will be hosting a live conversation titled “Drone attacks and data centers: New Risks for Big Tech” on Tuesday, November 17 at 1 pm ET with Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defense and security think tank. He leads RUSI’s work on how cloud services factor into national security and defense, along with tech sovereignty efforts.

Jarnecki has done extensive research on how Ukraine strengthened its cloud resilience with Western partners despite facing both cyberattacks and kinetic attacks at the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, and explored what that means for NATO and European governments’ cloud adoption plans.

This year, Jarnecki has written about Iran’s drone and missile strikes on Amazon data centers in the Middle East during the US-Israeli war with Iran, and the broader implications for governments and Big Tech. He has also commented on the impacts of Russia and Ukraine exchanging strikes on each other’s data centers.