An article by Bruce Perens just popped up on Slashdot discussing what he is calling a "Cyber-Attack" on April 9 in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties in Northern California. A slightly less breathless account of the incident can be read in the Mercury News. They go with "phone outage" rather than "Cyber-Attack" although in this day and age it's difficult to separate the two.

The short version of the story is that unknown intruders opened up a manhole cover, entered the vault beneath, and cut a number of fiber-optic cables, which happened to carry a significant amount of traffic including voice and Internet serving some important locations, such as a local hospital and 911 center (in addition to a swath of private businesses and homes). Some local cell service also went down as the trunks to towers were severed. An unanticipated side effect was failure of software systems internal to the hospital, which apparently required outside connectivity to function.

All this causes understandable concern over the capability of significant public safety providers to deliver services, but I am having trouble seeing how it rises to a new level of threat, as Perens seems to suggest. At the conclusion of his piece, he asks "Will there be another Morgan Hill [the largest town effected]? Definitely," but it seems to me there have already been plenty of Morgan Hills, many with much worse effects than the actual Morgan Hill. Major power outages have disrupted more services, for a longer period, over far larger areas. The September 11th attacks had similar effects on electronic communications systems and exposed systemic failings in IT systems in a similar manner. Were those cyber-attacks?

Perens suggests that the implications of this particular attack are cause for a major re-evaluation of the use of SaaS, VoIP, and any software which relies on Internet connections. I think that approach is excessively reactionary, and ignores many of the redundancy benefits of those technologies that lead us to them in the first place. Consider the many business organizations which cannot afford fully geographic redundant application servers to host their internal mail; Perens' suggestion is that all critical applications and e-mail be based at the business' site, and one is left to assume that this means more than it says, since locating services in a single physical location without offsite backups is already known as an equally bad idea. But should you simply go without e-mail if you can't afford a full main site and a geographically diverse backup, and the staff to operate it? It is the economics of centralization that allows a large measure of the safety that service subscribers already enjoy.

I'm not suggesting there aren't lessons to be learned from outages but I think we're already well on the way to learning them, and that looking backward in fear is not a helpful addition to the process. Morgan Hill reacted well and handled the issue with aplomb, and while there is some truth to Perens' assertion that disaster-prone Western towns are naturally better prepared for these issues, I think he denigrates other agencies and organizations by suggesting they aren't ready for similar outages, whether natural or man-made. I think most are prepared for much worse.

Having said that, his article is full of more practical suggestions for preparation and testing and is worth a read. My own preference is not to avoid new technologies and outsourced services, but instead to focus on independent and redundant lines of communication with which to reach them. This approach is much less reactionary, is less costly overall, and pays much greater dividends in the event of trouble than does basing all services at your own site. Having good reliable external communications is going to provide advantages far beyond simply keeping your e-mail and access to Google Docs up and running in an emergency.