In an urban society, everything connects. Our lives are woven together in a fabric, but the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.
That’s the opening narration to Threads, Mick Jackson’s excellent television film from 1984 about nuclear war shown through the impact on people in Sheffield. It’s brilliant, terrifying, and more relevant than ever.
We live in a time where our global interconnectivity would have been the stuff of science fiction when Jackson made Threads. Amazon Web Services’ data centres in UAE were struck on Monday by what were, at the time, referred to as objects. The assumption, at the time of publication, was it was some form of ordnance from Iran as the situation in the Middle East gets increasingly worrying.
How the data centres were taken out of action is secondary in the moment to the fact that they were as part of an ongoing conflict. The cloud, so often framed in abstract and borderless terms, has always had a physical home, or rather a set of physical homes in the form of data centres.
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These data centres, as many reading this will be all too aware, require power sources, cooling systems, easy access to water, and functioning access roads. Essentially the types of things, along with staff, that aren’t easy to come by in a conflict zone.
Ireland is a critical node in the global data centre network, particularly with regard to users in the European Union. While the tax breaks here obviously attracted big operators like AWS early, the mild climate has made them seek to expand. Our weather fits in the Goldilocks zone of what is needed to optimally run data centres.
Ireland has also long been a key landing point for subsea cables, going back to the very beginning of the development of transatlantic communication. From long before independence and over a century since, Ireland has been central to global connectivity.
Ireland benefits economically from being a connectivity hub but the risks that come with that are significant.
If that doesn’t scare you given the current climate then it ought to. It wouldn’t take a bombardment from a nearby force to hurt that infrastructure, although we’re fortunate none of our neighbours are of a mood to do so.
The bar to physically damaging a data centre to a point of inoperability is much lower. Take out part of one or even a whole one and redundancy gets built in. That’s what turns a potential catastrophe on a pan-European level into a minor inconvenience. It’s the over-reliance on that redundancy where things get much messier.
While a physical assault on a data centre located here can’t be entirely ruled out, the more common method of attacking digital infrastructure is usually digital. Weaponised IT is nothing new but its strength and capability is growing. International actors know that they can launch digital attacks on these shores without ever leaving their own.
In simple terms, the system works until it doesn’t or someone makes sure it doesn’t. Then disruptions hit quickly.
In the event of an attack, and operators are capable of making the HSE hack of 2020 look like a minor scratch, the impact could be enormous. The immediate impact would be felt in Ireland and the knock-on would spread, at an alarming speed, impacting the wider EU and the global operations of companies doing business within it.
[ Iran war: How Israel and the US are co-ordinating their attackOpens in new window ]
If you think this is an effort to use subtext to make you rethink Ireland’s neutrality, you’re sadly missing the point. Irrespective of Ireland’s status in that regard, the exposure would be unchanged.
Global operators here already go to the same lengths they would in terms of protection that they would were Ireland openly allied with any group militarily. Similarly, the impact on the level of action by the Government and our security forces would also be negligible.
Ireland is a target no matter what flags we raise or memberships we hold as a nation. Right now, it’s all in the abstract for most of us. The connectivity we rely on is invisible until it starts to fail.
Think of how connected your world has become. You’ve already likely had issues in recent months accessing work systems due to Cloudflare outages. Most of your life beyond the office is dependent on that connectivity.
You pay for most things with your card. The wages or salary you get from your job are paid digitally. Most of the entertainment you consume, even through anachronistically named terrestrial channels, rely on connectivity. Even this article is being consumed by more people using all those pipes and cables in the background than in physical form. That said, getting this on to a printed page and distributed through retailers depends on connections.
The threads that tie our lives together are more fragile than they were 40 years ago when Jackson’s film first aired. An object hitting a building in Dubai this past week was a stark reminder of that.
