You may have noticed the internet stopped working recently.
A relatively minor AWS outage in the cloud provider’s US-EAST-1 Region hub was still able to bring down Fortnite, Snapchat, and a bunch of Canadian startups for a day, with some experts predicting hundreds of billions in lost productivity. Days later, a Microsoft Azure outage did similar damage.
“We were sleepwalking our way into this new economy and we’ve had a bit of a wakeup call.”
That’s not a good look for the sovereignty crowd, who are calling for Canada to build its own digital infrastructure to counter US dominance.
But what if I told you that Canada already had a sovereign cloud? Many of them, in fact.
Ian Rae, CEO of cloud computing service provider Aptum, has been building the infrastructure of the internet since 1994. He’s also on Minister Evan Solomon’s AI Task Force to help renew the nation’s AI strategy (including infrastructure and sovereignty).
On this episode of The BetaKit Podcast, Rae explains why outages happen and what they reveal about the economics of the internet. He also makes the case that digital sovereignty is less about border control and more about control of our supply chain. For him, an ‘elbows up’ mentality of trying to rebuild everything in Canada is “naive.”
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So how do we rebuild Canada’s digital sovereignty, and what does it look like?
Let’s dig in.
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Recorded and edited at Toronto Podcasts.