Exploring the Preventive Contribution of Data Localisation Against Information Technology Outages: The CrowdStrike Case

The severe impacts of the CrowdStrike outage on the world economy and national ‎critical services, e.g., banking, healthcare, and airports, invoked the urgent need to ‎decrease governmental dependence on foreign tech companies to store and manage ‎national data. An effective alternative to this approach is data localisation. The latter ‎includes the physical placement of data infrastructure within the state’s territory or ‎imposing ultimate national control over data stored in a server located abroad, ‎along with relevant managing software. The research points out the prominence of ‎data localisation to protect national data, and the functionality of services ‎depending on this data, against technical failures that cause outages. In this ‎endeavour, the research reviews the concepts of territoriality and localisation of ‎cyberspace, along with shedding light on the CrowdStrike outage ‎and explaining ‎its reasons and consequences. Then, it introduces a justification for the validity of ‎data localisation for preventing outages' negative impacts and protecting national ‎data. ‎© The Author(s) 2024. Published by RITHA Publishing. This article is distributed under the terms of the license CC-BY 4.0., which permits any further distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited maintaining attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and URL DOI.