Boards prepare for digital infrastructure shocks, survey says

By Leo Marchandon

Sept 8 (Reuters) - Large companies and public bodies are increasingly scrutinising their dependence on critical digital infrastructure as geopolitical tensions, export controls and cyber threats expose vulnerabilities that were once largely taken for granted, a Capgemini survey published on Tuesday showed.

Responses from executives at 1,300 large organisations across 11 countries suggest digital infrastructure is increasingly being treated like energy and physical supply chains, requiring board oversight, contingency planning and investment.

"There used to be a sense of these risks. Now they have become concrete," said Nicolas Gaudilliere, the Capgemini executive who led the study.

Companies are allocating resources to identify critical risks, and some, including Airbus, have begun making changes to reduce dependencies on key technologies and providers, the report said.

Gaudilliere said recent events had made those dependencies impossible to ignore, pointing to attacks on data centres and telecommunications infrastructure during the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as examples of risks that have become more visible.

Charles-Pierre Astolfi, chief information officer at France's National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information, said digital sovereignty was fundamentally about "substitutability" and the ability to replace critical technologies when needed.

Executives associated digital sovereignty with business-critical assets, from proprietary data and AI models to intellectual property.

Gaudilliere said the issue was not confined to Europe.

"It's not a geographical notion," he said. "We're not opposing countries."

The question, he said, is less who supplies a technology than whether organisations can switch providers if circumstances require it.

Nearly half of the organisations surveyed said replacing a critical provider would take between three months and a year, while more than a third said it would take longer than a year.

Rather than replacing technology providers wholesale, organisations are increasingly focused on ensuring they retain control of valuable data, AI models and other critical workloads that would be difficult to replace if access were disrupted.

(Reporting by Leo Marchandon in Gdansk; Editing by Matt Scuffham)