The Internet is down -- now what?

January 2008

According to the recent Business Roundtable report, “Growing Business Dependence on the Internet — New Risks Require CEO Action,” there is a 10 to 20 percent chance of a “breakdown of the critical information infrastructure” in the next 10 years, brought on by “malicious code, coding error, natural disasters, [or] attacks by terrorists and other adversaries.” An Internet meltdown would result in reduced productivity and profits, falling stock prices, erosion of consumer spending and potentially a liquidity crisis, the report says. The organization based its conclusions on earlier risk analyses done by the World Economic Forum in Geneva. The director of public policy at The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs from large U.S. companies, says business executives often fail to realize how dependent they have become on the public network — for e-mail, collaboration, e-commerce, public- facing and internal Web sites, and information retrieval by employees. He also notes that disaster recovery and business-continuity plans often fail to take into account the threat an Internet disruption poses to a company and its suppliers. Moreover, business executives often mistakenly believe that government will take the lead in restoring network services in the face of an Internet failure, he says. “What we wanted to do in this report is say to CEOs, ‘You may not realize that whole segments of your business are almost completely dependent on the Internet, and it’s not enough to have a few IT specialists to help you respond to problems as they come up.’”