Telecoms provider Go recently lost its internet international gateway. For most of the day ISPs who subscribe to the company were left with no connectivity. Those enterprises which have gone 'e' were denied services - resulting in lost productivity, turnover, communications.
What would have happened had the damage to the cable been more serious and days, rather than hours, were required to restore connectivity? One shudders to think. Malta has been successful in transforming itself to an information economy and society. It has attracted international e-services firms that range from i-gaming to e-billing to software development. Malta is re-branding itself as the Smart Island - at the core of which rests one of Malta's major foreign investments: Smart City.
Yet this extremely serious incident has brought home how fragile our e-economy is. The blood line for the e-economy, international bandwidth and connectivity depends on two cables owned by two service providers, Go and Vodafone, both routing to Sicily.
The e-economy is a transient economy. It gravitates to countries that not only have attractive fiscal investment regimes but those which guarantee integrity, availability, confidence and security in terms of their ICT regimes - whether these are legislative or infrastructural. The e-economy operates 24/7, 365 days a year. A denial of service of 12 hours is nothing less than an unmitigated disaster. The response and reaction by Go, Vodafone and the MCA constitute a body blow to the confidence that an e-economy demands to thrive - an e-economy that the government has for the past decade, with success, striven hard to achieve.
The statements, and counter statements, issued by the parties demonstrate that no serious contingency planning was in place. Go accuses Vodafone of not being supportive. Why did not Go have a back-to-back agreement with Vodafone that would allow for transparent routing of its e-services in the event of such a scenario? To save on costs? Was it a case of hubris? How many times has Go carried out scenario management in anticipation of such a disaster to ensure that it has protocols - communications, services, and technology related - that would kick off in the event of such a disaster? Why did Vodafone, reportedly, only provide limited back-up services to Go? Surely this was a shortsighted tactic - a disaster of this scale shakes the confidence in Malta of the entire e-economy stakeholders: a reconsideration of Malta as a stable platform for e-services provision affects Vodafone as much as Go. And if the market failed to come together to minimise the impacts of this disaster, where was the regulator? Why did it not intervene? What kept it from doing so?
The lesson that emerges is that Malta, through its regulator and its services providers, are not prepared for such a disaster. Had they invested in contingency planning, the impacts would surely have been mitigated.
While it is recognised that both service providers have committed to invest in cables to provide for greater redundancy routes, this is not enough. Contingency planning, disaster management protocols, and proper intervention by the regulator as and when necessary are of fundamental importance if Malta is to live up to the reputation it has slowly but surely built as an attractive platform for e-business. A painful experience unfolded earlier this month. Has the lesson been learnt? Malta must ensure it has.