Whitehall hasn’t been asleep. In NCSC, we have a world-leading national cybersecurity centre, and the Information Commissioner taking a more active role as a policeman. Our Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, the CPNI, has also been examining cloud services. We want to beef up the well meaning set of proposals we inherited on leaving the EU, and last year the Ministry of Fun, DCMS, consulted on how we might do this. Rogers’ code of practice for IoT became a European standard in 2019. So much for our loss of influence now we are outside the EU.

But as Jessica Figueras, an independent cybersecurity consultant, points out, getting the cloud giants to ’fess up with their users, or even admit there’s an outage, is not easy. They keep vital information to themselves, as I’ve found with Nvidia this week. And perhaps the outages don’t cost them enough. Amazon last month announced a new model for cloud computing, “Local Zones”, which creates national data centres around the world. 

Alas, it did so for performance, not reliability reasons, and the nearest Zone to the UK will be in Amsterdam. London and Dublin have been overlooked. What a pity, for like Japan and New Zealand, the UK finds itself uniquely vulnerable to nefarious people tampering with its undersea fibre optic data cables. We are all island nations.

So perhaps we can learn from a most unlikely source: Vladimir Putin. Over a decade ago, Russia experimented with cutting itself off from the global internet, to see what broke. It found that actually, rather a lot did break, and so Russia has spent the subsequent years creating “Rusnet”, a more resilient national data infrastructure. 

There’s a lesson there if we don’t want UK plc to be paralysed. We do not need to adopt Putin’s paranoid, isolationist strategy wholesale, just as we don’t need to give up the convenience that cloud hyperscalers offer us. But we should learn how to prevent failure cascading throughout the economy, and society, by thinking about the design of these vital systems from the ground up.

Andrew Orlowski tweets at @andreworlowski