13 April 2026
By Pertisth Mankotia, Treasurer, Governing Body of CIO Association
CIO, Sheela Foams
The modern battlefield extends beyond traditional land, air, and sea, now encompassing the digital infrastructure of economies, including data centers, cloud services, and global connectivity networks.
Recent incidents in the Middle East have highlighted this shift. In March 2026, an AWS data center in the UAE was struck by unidentified objects, causing a fire and power outage that affected services in the ME‑CENTRAL‑1 (UAE) region and had ripple effects into the ME‑SOUTH‑1 (Bahrain) region. Major banks like Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and First Abu Dhabi Bank, along with the mobility platform Careem, faced service disruptions during this event.
Although India has not experienced a similar attack, the potential risks are clear.
The pressing question is no longer whether such threats will arrive in India, but how prepared its enterprises are to respond when they do.
The New Reality: Data centers as Strategic Targets
The Middle East episode sits within a broader shift: data centers are no longer just technical assets; they are now potential nodes in geopolitical and military strategy.
Reports indicate that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked Tasnim news agency circulated a so-called “hit list” over Telegram, naming global tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia, with facilities in the Gulf and Israel flagged as potential future targets. While the exact wording and intent behind the list remain framed in the language of deterrence and negotiation, the message is clear: cloud and data-centre infrastructure are now part of the strategic calculus in contemporary conflicts.
The Ukraine war offers a complementary warning. Russian missile and drone strikes have repeatedly targeted energy grids and transmission infrastructure around cities like Kyiv, causing widespread blackouts and disrupting internet nodes. There is no widely documented case of a direct strike on a specific Kyiv-based data-centre facility in 2022, but the pattern matters: once power and fibre connectivity fail, even the most advanced data-centre hardware can be rendered idle within minutes.
For enterprises, this means that availability cannot be measured only in uptime percentages; it must also be evaluated against war-time conditions.India’s Question: What If This Happens Here?
India is undergoing a surge in AI adoption, cloud-native workloads, data-localisation mandates, and hyperscale data-centre development. Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and the NCR are emerging as focal points of this digital expansion. These hubs host not only domestic workloads but also regional cloud zones and interconnection ecosystems that serve broader South-East and Central Asian markets.
If a geopolitical escalation, physical attack, or large-scale infrastructure failure were to impact any of these clusters, the consequences would likely extend well beyond the immediate area.
This forces a re-examination of three core pillars: physical resilience, energy, and connectivity.
Data Center Vulnerabilities: Beyond Perimeter Security
The Middle East incidents show that disruption is rarely contained to a single layer. Structural damage from projectiles, power-distribution failures, and water damage from fire-suppression systems can all combine to take a facility offline, even if perimeter security and access control were robust.
In the Indian context, data center presence in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and NCR creates a similar concentration risk. A single event—whether a natural disaster, technical incident, or conflict-related strike—could damage not just one facility but multiple ones across the same grid and fibre footprint.
If Indian Data Centres Are Targeted: What’s the Alternative?
If a coordinated attack were to disrupt India’s key data centers, enterprises cannot rely on traditional disaster recovery playbooks alone. The alternative lies in distributed, border-agnostic resilience. means architecting workloads across multi-country cloud regions, enabling active-active deployments rather than passive backups, and leveraging edge computing nodes to keep critical services running closer to users even during central outages.
Satellite-based connectivity and independent network layers can act as fallback communication channel if terrestrial fibre is compromised. Equally important is the adoption of sovereign and hybrid cloud models, allowing sensitive workloads to remain within India while non-critical operations seamlessly failover to global infrastructure. In a wartime or crisis scenario, resilience will no longer depend on a single “recovery site,” but on an ecosystem that is geographically distributed, network-diverse, and operationally autonomous.
Energy: The Achilles Heel of AI Infrastructure
AI workloads are energy-intensive by design. Training large models and operating AI-driven analytics platforms can turn data centers from modest IT hubs into power-hungry facilities that rival small-city consumption levels. Any disruption—grid failure, fuel-shortage for backup generators, or cooling-system breakdown—can halt operations in minutes.
For India, the challenge is twofold: maintaining reliable power at scale while also moving toward sustainable energy sources. Enterprises building AI-centric infrastructure can no longer afford to rely solely on diesel-based backups or single-utility ties. Distributed power-generation strategies, including solar, battery storage, and dynamic-load-management systems, are becoming strategic requirements, not niceties. In an AI-driven economy, energy resilience is business-continuity resilience.
Connectivity: The Invisible Single Point of Failure
Even when a data center remains powered and structurally intact, connectivity can become the weakest link. During conflict-related network rerouting, latency spikes, congestion, and partial path failures can degrade services to the point of operational uselessness.
In India, the risk is amplified by dependence on chokepoints in subsea-cable routes and terrestrial fibre corridors. Cyclones such as Vardah (2016) and Fani (2019) damaged undersea and terrestrial fibre cables in the Bay of Bengal, causing slowdowns and packet-loss patterns even in cities far from the eye of the storm, including slowdowns reported in Pune. Likewise, Chennai, a major cable-landing hub, has seen repeated disruptions from cyclones like Vardah and Michaung, which cut or degraded undersea and terrestrial fibre links, leading to nationwide internet slowdowns and localized outages.
Redundancy in compute is meaningless without redundancy in connectivity. Enterprises must invest in multiple fibre routes, multiple network providers, edge-compute nodes, and interconnection ecosystems that can reroute traffic around damaged or targeted infrastructure.
Cloud Strategy: From Cost-Savings to Resilience
Cloud strategy can no longer be driven purely by cost-optimization or short-term performance gains. It must now explicitly incorporate geopolitical-risk diversification, cross-region failover capabilities, and multi-cloud resilience. In this light, India can position itself as a strategic failover hub for workloads that need to be relocated from conflict-prone or sanction-sensitive regions. However, that role will only be credible if Indian data-centre infrastructure is built and governed to global-scale resilience standards.
Cyber-Physical Hybrid Threats
Today’s threats are rarely “just cyber” or “just physical.” The Ukraine conflict has already illustrated how cyber-attacks, physical strikes, and information-operations converge. In such a situation, companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, and satellite-network provider like Starlink played critical roles in defending networks and restoring connectivity under fire.
The next evolution will be hybrid attacks that combine physical strikes on power and fibre with coordinated cyber-intrusions against data-centre management systems. To defend against this, enterprises must integrate cyber-security, physical-security, and operational-resilience functions under a unified framework, with shared threat-intelligence and cross-layer monitoring.
Supply Chain Disruptions: The Hidden Risk
Behind every data-centre project lies a fragile global supply chain. Disruptions in strategic chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz or the Suez Canal can delay shipments of servers, GPUs, cooling systems, and networking gear, inflating costs and delaying expansion plans. The 2021 Suez-Canal blockage, for instance, showed us how quickly shipping bottlenecks can compound existing hardware shortages, affecting data-centre and AI-infrastructure rollouts globally.
For India, which still relies heavily on imported components, this is not a theoretical concern. We need to think around local sourcing, maintain strategic inventory buffers, and design deployment plans that tolerate multi-week delivery delays.
What Indian Enterprises Should Do Now
The response cannot be fear-driven; it must be planning-driven. Indian enterprises should:
Build distributed resilience: Leverage multi-region and multi-country deployments, and combine cloud and on-premises architectures in ways that can isolate and reroute around damaged nodes.
Bring compute closer to data: Reduce latency and regulatory friction by aligning workloads with data-sovereignty requirements and localised AI-stacks.
Strengthen the connectivity fabric: Invest in interconnection ecosystems and multiple fibre-and-wireless-paths that can absorb partial-cable failures.
Integrate cyber and physical security: Establish unified threat-intelligence and 24x7 monitoring across both digital and physical layers.
Treat infrastructure as strategy: Recognise data-centres as strategic assets and align investment decisions with long-term national and business-continuity goals.
The Future Is about Preparedness
Events in the Middle East are not isolated anomalies; they are early signals of a new era where digital infrastructure is both a target and a weapon. For India, this is a moment of opportunity and urgency.
A strong Make in India push in data-centre hardware, power systems, and sovereign cloud ecosystems can reduce dependence on fragile global supply chains, shorten response times, and build a trusted, resilient data-hub for the region.
In this new era, self-reliance in digital infrastructure is not merely an economic strategy—it is national security preparedness.By Pertisth Mankotia, Treasurer, Governing Body of CIO Association
CIO, Sheela Foams
