Drone and missile attacks 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 large technology companies, but also for governments and everyone who depends on digital services common in modern life.
To explore what all this means for modern society’s reliance on cloud resilience, I’ll 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 fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defense and security think tank. He leads RUSI’s work on how cloud services influence national security and defense, along with technology sovereignty efforts.
Jarnecki has conducted extensive research on how Ukraine strengthened its cloud resilience with Western partners despite facing both cyber and kinetic attacks at the start of the large-scale Russian invasion, and explored what that means for the cloud adoption plans of NATO and European governments.
This year, Jarnecki has written about Iran’s drone and missile attacks on Amazon data centers in the Middle East during the US-Israel war with Iran, and the broader implications for governments and big tech companies. He has also commented on the impacts of Russia and Ukraine trading attacks on each other’s data centers.
