The global Microsoft outage affecting millions of users worldwide including several Indian users and businesses has re-ignited the call for a sovereign tech stack. From banking scions to the ‘Make in India’ proponents, all demand further localisation or regionalisation norms to protect the interests of Indian businesses and users.
CrowdStrike outage affects Windows PC users globally
Responding to the global outage that affected millions of Windows users worldwide, Kotak Bank scion and co-head of Kotak811 (Kotak’s digital savings account) – Jay Kotak called for more guardrails against global tech stacks and said, “Challenges in Microsoft software have caused chaos across India - airports, brokers, retailers & more. Globalization is good - but guardrails are needed.” He added, “Sovereign nations must drive localized data & tech stacks, sectoral foreign ownership/mgmt norms etc, to mitigate such risks.”
Economist and writer Sanjeev Sanyal said, “Microsoft glitch causes global shutdown of banks, financial markets, flights ........ This is why genetic diversity is important. A unified, interconnected global system is a bad idea. A less interconnected system may appear inefficient but will be more resilient. This is an important conclusion of the CAS-based approach to AI regulation.”
- Also read: How to survive an outage like this
However other experts noted that a blanket call for indigenisation might be unwise. In the case of CrowdStrike which provides advanced cybersecurity to Windows, an indigenous or local alternative will quite possibly not provide the same security.
Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst at Greyhound Research explained, “A local product for cybersecurity is not as useful as a global product. A globally deployed product is dealing with a host of threats for which it develops interventions and capabilities. A globally deployed vendor can apply learnings from one country in all the countries where it is present. A local vendor will not have similar knowledge sharing capabilities.”