The Dutch Digital Infrastructure Foundation is urging the Netherlands to take stronger measures to restore the country’s resilience against external threats. Unfortunately, it appears that the threat of sabotage against undersea cables and other disruptions to the internet has increased significantly in recent times. It is therefore important for the Netherlands to strengthen its resilience against these types of threats!
Greater redundancy and a move away from monoculture
In the Netherlands, there is still a monoculture when it comes to internet networks and fiber-optic cables. This means that many networks lack backup cables or systems in the event of a failure or sabotage. We still see this frequently in the digital sector in our country. This monoculture now poses significant financial and digital risks. If undersea cables are sabotaged, essential networks could simply go down because they have no backup. This problem, of course, became very clear some time ago when airports and hospitals were shut down due to an update to Microsoft’s antivirus program.
How can you increase redundancy?
The question now, of course, is: how do we ensure greater redundancy in the Netherlands? According to political advisor Marijn van Vliet, we would do well to follow Germany’s example. There, the Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS) works to make the government less vulnerable. This initiative also promotes greater use of open-source software. Thanks to ZenDiS, the German government has an exit strategy—something we unfortunately lack in our country right now. Thanks to this initiative, public institutions can always fall back on an alternative. This makes institutions more independent and therefore better secured!
Surely that’s possible in the Netherlands too?
Yes, that should certainly be possible in the Netherlands as well. All open-source software is integrated, and then maintenance and patching are outsourced to a service provider, while hosting is handled by a cloud provider. The Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations must address this in collaboration with the Ministry of Economic Affairs. But in addition to this problem, we also have the vulnerable undersea cables near the Netherlands Antilles. In this area, there are only two fiber-optic cable routes, both of which belong to the same provider. If something goes wrong here, the entire Caribbean region goes down. So, in fact, an additional cable needs to be laid here. The Ministry of Defense is currently in talks with DINL regarding the physical security of the undersea cables.