Introduction: Why now ?
Why now ?
For more than a decade, companies have built on the assumption that major cloud providers are effectively permanent utilities: always available, globally reachable, and politically neutral.
In the past months, each of those assumptions has been challenged.
- In 2024, multiple undersea internet cables were sabotaged in the Baltic Sea - and similar incidents are happening elsewhere.
- On November 18th 2025, Cloudflare suffered a global outage that briefly broke a huge slice of the internet. Some estimates suggested that roughly one in five webpages were affected at the height of the incident.
- On November 19th 2025, six judges and three prosecutors at the International Criminal Court were sanctioned by the Trump administration, locking them out of numerous digital services (Paypal, Apple Pay, Amazon…).
- As of January 2026, the European Union is rumored to be preparing sanctions against major American technology companies, banks and financial institutions if the United States refuses to withdraw its renewed claims over Greenland.
Digital infrastructure is no longer just a technical dependency. It is a strategic risk surface shaped by technology, law, economics, and geopolitics.
The core assumption
This guide starts from a simple but uncomfortable assumption: At some point, you may durably lose access to the main cloud providers, and undergo a cascading failure of cloud-dependent SaaS tools.
This guide helps you prepare for that moment through “Digital Preparedness”. Digital preparedness means knowing in advance how your organization will continue to operate if cloud providers or critical digital services suddenly and durably stop working - whether because of legal decisions, sanctions, cyber incidents, or geopolitical events.
The goal of this guide is to ensure your company retains:
- the capacity to communicate,
- control over its data and assets,
- the ability to operate in degraded mode,
- and the freedom to make deliberate decisions instead of emergency guesses.
Digital preparedness does not mean that everything keeps working. It means that enough works. Throughout this guide, you will be asked to define your Minimum Survivable Service : the smallest version of your product and organization that must continue operating to avoid irreversible damage. That may mean degraded performance, reduced functionality, manual processes or delayed recovery. But a degraded service that preserves customer trust, data access, and decision-making capacity is vastly preferable to a complete shutdown.
Who is this guide for ?
Digital preparedness is no longer a concern limited to regulated industries or critical infrastructure providers. It is becoming a baseline operational discipline for any company that expects to exist in a world where access to cloud services can no longer be taken for granted.
This guide is written for leaders, founders, and operators who rely on digital systems to run their organization, and who want to remain in control when those systems fail, degrade, or become unavailable.
Covid gave us a very interesting stress test of how prepared businesses thrive.
Mining giant Barrick Gold entered 2020 with unusual preparedness thanks to its experience managing disease outbreaks like Ebola. As COVID-19 emerged, Barrick implemented stringent protocols across its 14-country operations. By mid-February 2020, the company had begun screening and testing every entrant to its mines, setting up isolation periods, and conducting aggressive contact tracing. As a result, the company avoided major production interruptions, protecting both its workforce and its gold output at a time when competitors struggled.
Japanese automaker Toyota famously pioneered just-in-time production, but after the 2011 earthquake it instituted a pandemic-ready supply chain strategy: it required key suppliers to stockpile 2–6 months of semiconductor chips. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and a global chip shortage ensued, Toyota was “largely unscathed” by the semiconductor shortfall, whereas competitors like Volkswagen, GM, Ford, and Honda had to suspend or cut production. Indeed, in early 2021 Toyota raised its output targets and boosted profit forecasts by 54%, even as many rivals grappled with idle factories.
Covid did not remove access to cloud services, global platforms, or network connectivity. Geopolitical tensions, sanctions, extraterritorial regulations share a common trait: they constrain access to digital infrastructure instead of amplifying it.
Covid rewarded digital concentration. The next class of crises may do the opposite.
