ICTworks by Inveneo

Recently the East African undersea cables SEACOM and TEAMS experienced a major Internet outage when the cable they connect to, the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, was damaged on the Mediterranean sea bed.

As Moses Kemibaro explains, the outage was a shock to those now used to speedy Internet access and he calls for cloud computing redundancy:

The outage required Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Telcos to re-route their bandwidth via expensive satellite connections so as to maintain some semblance of connectivity – this tended from very bad to quite slow depending on your choice of service provider. It is for this very reason why we urgently need to have local clouds that function even when international bandwidth and cloud are not available. This way, essential cloud-based services will continue to function locally.

I'd like to take his idea one step father - we need offline cloud computing redundancy, not just local-to-Kenya redundancy. While I can appreciate that Nairobi Internet users would want to still reach servers in Westlands if SEACOm or TEAMS were down, those in Kisumu or Eldoret want their cloud services if the link to Nairobi goes down. And as well Kakamega or Siaya if their links to larger cities go down.

So this means re-thinking cloud computing from a central server farm in the USA or even in Nairobi, to many smaller server gardens in many local locations. Redundancy that can ensure connectivity to your apps, no matter which link goes down. A redundancy kinda like the Internet itself.

That's why I say that with cloud computing, all weather is local.

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