An Assessment of the Risk of Service Supplier Bankruptcies as a Cybersecurity Threat

Behind technology service suppliers lie companies that are subject to the risk of business failure due to market conditions and trading risks. Such failures could suddenly stop customers accessing services or content, with potentially devastating business and personal impacts, given the rising importance of digital economies. The risk can be illustrated by reference to cloud computing insolvencies but similar issues may affect other service providers. The insolvency of a cloud service provider would be likely to present problems of access to infrastructure, platforms, services and data and insolvency laws are not always designed to enable a managed closedown of a business, which would be needed to enable replacement services to be sourced and data recovered. This cybersecurity risk has barely been touched upon in literature, since it lies at the intersection between law and computer science, both areas requiring high levels of specialist understanding, and this chapter is part of initial attempts to identify the threats presented.