Digital resilience, dependency and privacy

As I prepare to move towards freelance work, I’ve found myself reviewing something I probably should have looked at more closely a long time ago: my own digital resilience and privacy.

When you work within a large organisation, much of the digital infrastructure around you is simply there. Email, storage, operating systems, collaboration tools and websites have already been chosen. Someone else has made those decisions, negotiated the contracts and accepted the dependencies that come with them.

Preparing to work independently changes that. I now have to think much more deliberately about what my own digital platform should look like, what I depend on, and where my data sits.

And in the current geopolitical environment, those questions feel increasingly relevant.

This isn’t really about being anti-American, anti-Microsoft, anti-Google or anti-anything else. I use plenty of US technology — including, somewhat ironically, ChatGPT to help me set up my new website and my Linux installation.

For me, it is more about two things: dependency and privacy.

Dependency matters

How dependent do I want to be on a single company, ecosystem or jurisdiction for the basic tools I need to work?

For years, many of us have gradually concentrated more and more of our professional lives into a small number of technology platforms. Email, files, calendars, contacts, documents, photos and communications may all sit inside one ecosystem. It is convenient, and convenience is powerful.

But concentration also creates dependency. If access changes, terms change, prices rise, an account is restricted, a service disappears, or wider political circumstances affect availability, the impact can be disproportionate.

In security management we routinely think about single points of failure. It seems reasonable to apply some of the same thinking to our own digital infrastructure.

Privacy is part of resilience

The second issue is privacy. I don’t particularly want every part of my digital life to be connected, profiled and analysed simply because that has become the default commercial model of much of the internet.

That does not mean disappearing from the modern digital world. It means making more conscious choices about what information I provide, who stores it, under which legal framework, and whether a service actually needs the data it asks for.

For my own setup, I have therefore started moving towards a more deliberately distributed model.

• Linux for my main working computer, giving me more control over the operating system and reducing dependence on a single commercial desktop ecosystem.
• Infomaniak for my website, professional email and kDrive, with infrastructure hosted in Switzerland.
• Proton Mail for private email.
• LibreOffice for everyday office work where I do not need a proprietary platform.
• A preference for keeping important files locally as well as maintaining sensible backups, rather than assuming that “in the cloud” automatically means resilient.

None of these choices is perfect, and that is not really the point. I am not trying to build a technology bunker or achieve some impossible state of complete digital independence.

The objective is simply to avoid unnecessary concentration and to understand the dependencies I am accepting.

Resilience is about options

For me, resilience has always been less about preventing every possible problem and more about retaining options when something goes wrong.

That principle applies just as well to digital systems as it does to operational security. If one service fails, can I still communicate? If one account becomes inaccessible, can I still reach my files? If a provider changes direction, can I move without rebuilding everything from scratch?

A resilient setup does not need to be complicated. In fact, complexity can create its own vulnerabilities. The goal is to know what you depend on, avoid unnecessary single points of failure, keep control of the information that matters, and make sure you have alternatives.

Moving into independent work has simply forced me to confront those questions more directly.

And perhaps that is no bad thing.