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East Africa should integrate its ICT resources for efficiency
Network outages are not a new phenomenon. They do happen but they can be prevented, at the infrastructure level, through diligent network planning and redundancy. For instance when the South Tower of the World Trade Centre collapsed on Deutsche Bank’s New York facility, the German banking giant lost its connection to the US markets. Almost immediately, however, backup systems in Ireland kicked in, and Deutsche Bank went on to clear more than $300 billion in transactions that same day. Photo/FILE
Posted Thursday, November 12 2009 at 00:00
This, I totally agree with. However, since the targets of attacks on our critical infrastructure would likely include both facilities in the economy and those in the government, the elimination of this potential vulnerability requires a closely coordinated effort by both the government and the private sector.
The policy should provide some form of a private-public partnership arrangement.
And to succeed, this partnership must be genuine, mutual and cooperative.
A good example of this kind of Policy is the American Presidential Directive of 1998 later revised in 2003 and the European Commission’s directive of 2006.
In both cases, critical infrastructure referred to the interconnected networks of economic, social and governance systems and assets.
To us just like the American and Europeans, a combination of ICT services are now the platform for the provision of energy, transportation, communications, as well as safety, financial, and health services.
These are what the policy should seek to protect since they form the bedrock for economic activity.
Although the motive in both cases was to protect critical infrastructure from terrorist attacks, the underlying principles of prevention, preparedness and response to attacks is still relevant to us. And these are what should form the basis of the policy.
Hare is a Director at the African eDevelopment Resource Centre. Follow him on Twitter@hareharry
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