The Next Line of Defence: Building Data Embassies for Resilience
Authors : Samir Saran | La Toya Waha
The Missing Layer in Twenty-First Century Continuity Strategy
Key Highlights
- Data continuity is a strategic necessity, not an IT function. As governance, critical infrastructure, and economic activity become increasingly digital, resilience depends on preserving the systems that sustain the functioning of the state before crisis strikes.
- Data embassies provide a strategic model for continuity before disruption occurs. Estonia institutionalised the concept after the 2007 cyberattacks, while Ukraine demonstrated under wartime conditions that preserving critical data is essential to maintaining the functioning of the state.
- The next step is to treat trusted digital infrastructure as a strategic reserve. Reciprocal data embassies — and eventually shared computing capacity — would convert political trust into operational resilience, making digital continuity a cornerstone of twenty-first-century security.
The Imperative
Global trends and strategic foresight underscore the imperative of preparing for future crises. As states and societies become increasingly digital, resilience is no longer defined solely by the protection of territory or physical infrastructure, but by the ability to preserve the digital systems that sustain governance, critical infrastructure, and economic activity. Data embassies should therefore be understood not as an IT contingency measure but as a strategic instrument of national resilience, ensuring the continuity of governance, essential public services, and critical societal functions when domestic digital infrastructure is compromised.
From a Theoretical Consideration to a Real-World Threat
In 2007, Estonia became the first state to experience a large-scale cyber campaign against its digital infrastructure. Coordinated cyberattacks disrupted government, banking, and media services, exposing a new strategic vulnerability: in a digital society, attacks on information systems can threaten the functioning of the state as seriously as attacks on physical infrastructure.
Fifteen years later, Ukraine confronted that vulnerability under wartime conditions. Days before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine passed emergency legislation allowing critical government data to be stored outside the country. More than 10 petabytes of government and public-sector data were migrated to secure cloud infrastructure in early 2022, involving multiple ministries and state agencies. The effort relied on encrypted transfers and portable storage systems to relocate critical datasets outside Ukraine as the Russian invasion began. This large-scale migration played a key role in supporting the continuity of essential government functions under conditions of severe wartime disruption.
These two cases mark a turning point in how resilience should be understood. The lesson is not that digital states are inherently fragile, but that digital dependence requires strategic preparation. Estonia institutionalised this insight through the concept of the data embassy: legally protected digital infrastructure hosted on allied territory to ensure the continuity of critical state functions even if domestic systems are compromised. Ukraine demonstrated the same principle under fire, relying on rapid data migration to preserve the operational core of government.
The lesson is not that digital states are inherently fragile, but that digital dependence requires strategic preparation. Estonia institutionalised this insight through the concept of the data embassy: legally protected digital infrastructure hosted on allied territory to ensure the continuity of critical state functions even if domestic systems are compromised.
Today, critical organisations all depend on digital infrastructure whose disruption can cascade across society. Data centres, cloud platforms, networks, and the software stack that connects them have become strategic assets – and strategic targets. Whether the disruption stems from armed conflict, cyberattacks, natural disasters, sabotage, or systemic infrastructure failure, the imperative is the same: resilience depends on ensuring data continuity before crisis strikes. Data embassies offer one strategic model for achieving that continuity – not only for governments, but increasingly for the critical sectors upon which modern societies depend. They constitute a significant extension of international law for the digital realm. The Estonian data embassy, for example, builds on a data centre in Luxembourg. Under Estonian control, it enjoys similar rights as physical diplomatic embassies.
The How: Three Architectures for Digital Continuity
Data embassies should not be understood as a single institutional model, but as a continuum of resilience architectures that can be adapted to different threat environments, trusted relationships, and operational requirements. Three models illustrate an incremental pathway from data protection to full digital continuity.
The first model is continuity mirroring. Operationally critical, but not highly sensitive, datasets are continuously replicated to trusted infrastructure abroad. If domestic systems become unavailable, the replicated data provides a rapid foundation for recovery. Like a military exercise, continuity mirroring builds the technical and organisational capabilities required for more advanced forms of resilience.
The second model is the data embassy. Critical government systems are hosted in a treaty-based, legally protected environment on the territory of a trusted partner, following the framework pioneered by Estonia and Luxembourg in 2017. Rather than transferring control, bilateral agreements establish legal guarantees over designated infrastructure and data to ensure the continuity of essential state functions even if domestic infrastructure is compromised. The objective is not secrecy, but availability: preserving access to the digital systems on which governance depends.
The third model extends the concept from data to computation. Rather than safeguarding information alone, trusted partners reserve secure computing capacity that can be activated to run essential government or critical infrastructure workloads when domestic capacity is degraded or destroyed. This “shadow compute” model is largely conceptual for now, but it reflects the next logical step in resilience planning. This model demands the highest level of strategic trust — not merely the agreement to store data, but the commitment to run another state’s critical workloads under crisis conditions. No publicly known treaty-based shadow compute arrangement exists between major economies, yet the logic of strategic reserves makes the gap conspicuous. As governments invest in digital autonomy and strategic digital infrastructure, reserving a fraction of that capacity for trusted partners would create a digital equivalent of a strategic reserve – not of energy or fuel, but of computational capability.
As governments invest in digital autonomy and strategic digital infrastructure, reserving a fraction of that capacity for trusted partners would create a digital equivalent of a strategic reserve – not of energy or fuel, but of computational capability.
Importantly, none of these models requires the routine sharing of highly classified information. However, a degree of alignment between the data protection regimes of states entering into these models is necessary. The focus is on continuity-critical data and services: population registers, tax systems, emergency communications, and other digital assets essential to maintaining governance and societal resilience. The objective is not to export a state’s most sensitive secrets, but to ensure that governments, critical infrastructure operators, and the societies they serve can continue to function when strategic disruption occurs.
The objective is not to export a state’s most sensitive secrets, but to ensure that governments, critical infrastructure operators, and the societies they serve can continue to function when strategic disruption occurs.
The Strategic Imperative for Governments and Critical Industries
The strategic case for data embassies rests on a simple principle: assets essential to national continuity should never depend on a single point of failure in the long run. States have long stockpiled strategic commodities, dispersed military capabilities, and secured overseas basing rights to ensure continuity under crisis conditions. As governance, critical infrastructure, and economic activity become increasingly digital, the same logic applies to data and the digital infrastructure that sustains it. The objective is not to protect data because it is digital, but because its continued availability has become indispensable to the resilience of modern societies.
Estonia and Ukraine illustrate the cost of waiting for crisis before building resilience. Estonia translated the lessons of the 2007 cyberattacks into a long-term strategy for digital continuity, culminating in the world’s first treaty-based data embassy. Ukraine demonstrated the same principle under wartime conditions through the rapid migration of critical government data to secure infrastructure. Both cases reveal the same strategic lesson: resilience cannot be improvised at the speed with which crises unfold.
For governments, this means identifying the digital assets whose loss would compromise constitutional authority, public administration, or the delivery of essential public services.
The geopolitical implications extend beyond resilience. Strategic reserves have long transformed political trust into shared infrastructure. In 2026, India and the United Arab Emirates expanded their cooperation on strategic petroleum reserves, including reciprocal storage arrangements that strengthen both countries’ energy security. The principle is directly applicable to digital infrastructure: trusted partners can designate protected storage and computing capacity as strategic digital reserves, converting political trust into operational resilience.
The first formalisation of a reciprocal data embassy arrangement will do more than secure the respective countries’ own resilience — it will set the template for how digital infrastructure is shared, protected, and governed in the century ahead. That is not an IT decision. It is a strategic one.
To date, no publicly known reciprocal data embassy arrangement exists between two major economies. Establishing such partnerships would move data embassies from a niche solution developed by digitally advanced smaller states to a foundational element of twenty-first-century resilience. The technology exists. The legal precedents exist. What remains is the political will to recognise data continuity as a strategic capability rather than an IT function. The first formalisation of a reciprocal data embassy arrangement will do more than secure the respective countries’ own resilience — it will set the template for how digital infrastructure is shared, protected, and governed in the century ahead. That is not an IT decision. It is a strategic one.
Originally Appeared here.
PM Modi’s new arc of trust will hold Indo-Pacific together
It will be necessary, as well, for Prime Minister Modi and President Prabowo Subianto to move the relationship forward if the Indo-Pacific is to create a genuinely indigenous and independent security framework
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is travelling to Jakarta, Auckland and Melbourne, undertaking a sequence of visits that may define New Delhi’s approach to the Indo-Pacific in the coming decades. A bold and audacious redrawing of the map of this vast maritime region is underway. This effort will seek to recover autonomy for the powers that reside here, and it will recentre the region’s story on good growth and inclusive development, away from the whims of extractive superpower contestation. India envisions a new geometry of collaboration, one not dependent on axioms outlined in Washington or Beijing, but drawn up by those who live here and thus have the most to gain or lose.
The first stop, and the lynchpin of any plan for the Indo-Pacific, is Indonesia. The world’s third-most populous nation is the archetypal Indo-Pacific power. Indeed, it is the nation the term might almost have been coined to describe. The archipelago sits astride every crucial trade route between the two oceans, has abundant natural resources and, like India, is a civilisational state that has long been committed to a “free and active” foreign policy that secures its autonomy.
It is the relationship between India and Indonesia that will set the course for the broader maritime region. And what is often overlooked is that this partnership has already grown manifold. Objectively, Jakarta is one of New Delhi’s most important partners. If you look at goods alone, trade between the two nations, at just under $30 billion a year, is significant. It has overtaken trade between India and the United Kingdom, and runs neck and neck with Indo-German trade. Goods trade will only grow, stimulated by the upgradation of India’s free trade agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and so will services, under-represented and under-reported at present. With a focus on marine logistics, technology and financial services, and new supply chains, this partnership will form the foundation for a free and open trading architecture in the region.
And it will be necessary, as well, for Prime Minister Modi and President Prabowo Subianto to move the relationship forward if the Indo-Pacific is to create a genuinely indigenous and independent security framework. These two maritime powers are the only ones with the scale, capacity and presence required to manage the region’s most vital chokepoints. Together they are the only powers positioned to become net security providers of this ocean, not by invitation from Washington or deference to Beijing, but because the sea lanes are theirs to protect in the first place.
Australia, meanwhile, is India’s breakout partner. A new economic partnership, Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA), was negotiated in 2022, signalling New Delhi’s new vision for trade. But it also built trust, a far scarcer commodity. That trust can serve to underpin the next stage of this relationship. That would require deeper integration: Our financial services, nuclear energy and resource processing industries must be integrated. These are areas where we both have great abilities, and our search is for autonomy, scale, and new technology. The strategic objective, once the habit of cooperation settles, must be defence co-production, where both could serve as trusted enablers of broader regional and global security.
New Zealand is a crucial key to the puzzle and not only because of its own strengths. The innovation island hosts advanced manufacturing capabilities, space and deep technology enterprises and agri-processing innovation, making it a vital component of India’s innovation sectors, food-security imperative and farm-income strategy. With the fourth largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ), the blue economy in its entirety is a natural domain of partnership with Aotearoa.
Alongside Canberra, Wellington will provide another crucial bridge to the Five Eyes security-intelligence ecosystem. This adds further resilience to a still new relationship.
Finally, together, India and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) can become the delivery mechanism for development across the South Pacific and neighbouring parts of ASEAN. They will provide the financing, digital and physical infrastructure, and human capital the region badly needs, as well as a credible alternative to exploitative or unreliable partners. India is, after all, the largest theatre for discovering development solutions for the planet; once that innovative energy is paired with the capital and standing in the Pacific of the ANZAC nations, it offers a development pathway that does not force smaller nations to be burdened with perverse debt or lease a naval base to supposed benefactors.
Modi’s new arc of trust will hold the Indo-Pacific together in these disruptive times. With India at its centre, draw the arc east from India through Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. Then draw it west through the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf and down the eastern seaboard of Africa.
This is the real story of the upcoming tour: The geographical centre of the Indo-Pacific resetting and redrawing an emerging order so that those who share this oceanic domain write the rules instead of just inheriting them.
Source : Indian Express, July 7, 2026
The fault line in India, US ties: America doesn’t understand ‘equal’
New Delhi must respond with open-eyed diplomacy, not open-hearted sentiment.
US President Donald Trump’s visit to China may not be remembered by posterity as much as Richard Nixon’s famous trip in 1972. But it has forced Indians to confront the parallels with what was hitherto considered the darkest chapter of the India-US relationship.
Nixon, like Trump, believed that resetting relations with China was in paramount American interest. Nixon, like Trump, led a White House and establishment that was instinctively unsympathetic to Indian concerns. And Nixon, like Trump, viewed the Pakistani military leadership through rose-tinted glasses. Nobody, not even ordinary Pakistanis, has ever celebrated a Pakistani military dictator more than Nixon or Trump.
But here is what matters: The relationship between India and the United States survived Nixon. It grew and flourished. The partnership is stronger than any one person, even an enormously consequential president. It is greater than any administration, any party, any geopolitical moment. It is beneficial for both and yet it is not definitional for either. We can live without it.
In the past, India navigated a hostile White House, a hostile establishment, and an indifferent American public. Today’s position is better, even if the Trump White House returns to overt hostility from its current passive-aggressive demeanor. Large sections of the Washington establishment continue to value the bilateral partnership. People-to-people connections have deepened. And the business-to-business ties of investment, innovation and trade have already demonstrated their capacity to ignore and outlast shifts in capital markets or political fashion.
This is not to minimise divergences that are neither superficial nor personality-driven. A structural faultline has emerged in Indo-US relations. It cannot be papered over. There are, in fact, three faultlines, not one.
India’s energy security, its abiding concern in global affairs, is imperiled by American unilateralism and breathtaking double standards on sourcing fuel from Russia. Washington’s search for detente with China removes the relationship’s strategic ballast. And India has reforged its sense of self: It will, and it must, continue to refuse to play the compliant partner to a whimsical Washington. These are serious, structural disagreements. They deserve to be named as such.
But we must also recognise the institutional convergences that persist. Bilateral military-to-military cooperation. Strands of collaboration under the Quad’s umbrella that Trump dislikes and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ambassador Sergio Gor seek to cleverly sustain. The INDUS-X defence ecosystem. The TRUST initiative for emergent technology and critical minerals and multiple supply chain partnerships. All of these receive undiminished official energy, and will continue to do so. And hard words and the 50 per cent tariffs notwithstanding, a trade deal was eventually arrived at. The glue holds. Barely, but it holds.
We should think of this moment as an opportunity. The US-India relationship has always been sold as an inevitable strategic convergence. But until recently, it was something else: Two very different civilisational world-views cohabiting uneasily. What Trump’s arrival did was strip away the diplomatic veneer.
New Delhi must respond with open-eyed diplomacy, not open-hearted sentiment. It must engage all strands of thought in the United States, a democracy almost as diverse and complex as ours. Trumpism may outlast Trump — both sides of the aisle asking, if in more polished terms, the same uncomfortable questions the current administration has posed.
The truth is that this president has done us a favour. We can now rework this relationship on more honest, durable terms.
This cohabitation was in many ways an arranged marriage. The two countries were joined together by a panchayat of wise elders: P V Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Bill Clinton, Manmohan Singh, George Bush, and their generations. The arranged-marriage mantra is: Ceremony first, compatibility later. For our two nations, the strategic relationship came first. Strategic convergence was supposed to follow.
It didn’t. Our worldviews did not converge the way matchmakers anticipated. A philosophical gap, one rooted in our respective democratic cultures, has persisted: India does not understand alliances; America does not understand autonomy.
In any marriage, both partners change, compromise and build a partnership of equals. A relationship between two civilisation-states is no different. The White House cannot write the rules of marriage without co-opting India’s distinctiveness. Until Washington accepts that India is an ancient nation with its own immutable timeline and unalterable threat calculus, and not a junior supplicant seeking admission to some charmed circle, this relationship will oscillate between promise and frustration. The fact is, America does not understand “equal”.
New Delhi is not holding its breath. As the old order dissipates, India is neither dismantling nor defending it. Foreign policy and strategic autonomy have visibly been very hard work and yet an imperative. To be fair, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team are rearranging the pieces rather well. India has discovered a new and appropriate proximity and distance to the US, deeper strategic intimacy with the EU, recalibration with Beijing — while engaging Moscow in a dynamic world.
The India-US partnership will endure. It survived Nixon; it will survive Trump. But whether it matures is a different question entirely. The answer depends on one thing alone: America deciding it can accept India on mutually agreeable terms. The Trump White House doesn’t understand the question. Perhaps its successor will need to find the answer.
Originally Appeared in Indian Express. Read it here
Samir Saran 