The Former Head of Information Warfare for Australian Defense believes the latest Facebook outage highlights Australia’s over-reliance on international platforms and systems.
Dr Marcus Thompson believes Australia is ‘at the whim’ of companies half a world away with Australian organizations having no alternative platform to reach their stakeholders.
“Thousands of Australian organizations large and small, commercial enterprises and not-for-profits rely on Facebook to operate and have woken up today with no alternative platform to reach their stakeholders,” said the Senior Advisor to Macquarie Telecom Group.
“That this is happening during the pandemic – on the cusp of the easing of restrictions when social media marketing will be critical in helping many businesses bounce back – makes the situation even worse.
“The outage highlights the over-reliance Australian businesses have on international digital platforms and systems. When cyberattacks or other disruptions inevitably strike these international platforms, with no local, sovereign networks, infrastructure or methods to fall back on, we’re at the whim of clean-up and remedial measures taking place half a world away.
“In Australia we have some of the greatest data and security skills in the world, but we don’t leverage them nearly enough to help us connect with each other and with the wider world. Events like this and the recent Fastly outage demonstrate the thin tightrope we’re walking on when we rely on companies in other countries for critical digital services and infrastructure.”
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