Distant wars pose risks for Africa’s digital services
Ruben’s view Africa’s growing reliance on digital services demands greater transparency about the infrastructure behind them.
Key points
- “Something happening across the world can affect Africa.” ‘Digital sovereignty’ Increasing numbers of African businesses are moving operations to the cloud, but as there is a lack of in-country servers, many are hosted abroad, said Amreesh Phokeer, research director at non-profit advocacy group the Internet Society.
- Digital infrastructure has now become a target in conflict and with many African businesses leaning on overseas servers and the cables connecting them to the continent, the recent attacks raise questions about the resilience and control over their own data.
- “Moving interconnected systems between data centers is a complex process,” Elmaki said, while describing the disruptions as temporary “affecting certain functions of our services in Côte d’Ivoire.
Mauritania launched a national cloud service in June to support public administration, and Gabon inaugurated a data center built by pan-African technology company ST Digital in July to host government and business services.
Under the banner of “digital sovereignty,” they are expanding local data centers and cloud services to gain more control over their data and digital economies.
Additional details
- Though temporary, the issue was a reminder of Africa’s vulnerability as a result of being reliant on internet infrastructure beyond the continent.
- As African countries put more banking, public services and state records in the cloud, unanswered questions of this kind carry greater weight.
- In response to my questions, the company did not identify the infrastructure partner involved or say where the services had moved.
- The vital internet cables linking Africa and Europe have also been disrupted amid fighting.
- The News When users in Côte d’Ivoire of the popular ride-hailing and food-ordering app, Yango, started experiencing delays booking taxis and deliveries last month, the glitches were not to do with local bandwidth or power outages but the impact of problems elsewhere in the world.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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