Resilient, sustainable and solidarity-based computing systems – Isorédu

The Isoredu project consists in studying the resilience of computing systems in small companies, associations and local authorities. The activity of such actors rely on their digital apps and services. In case of failure or data losses, the consequences may be tragic for their business.

In order to increase the resilience of computing system, we observe a trend to the externalization, mainly towards large international operators in the cloud. However, delegating its own computing system may have some drawbacks in terms of economic dependency (the cloud operator is in strong position), sovereignty (cloud operator may have to conform with foreign laws that do not guaranty the confidentiality), technology (the reversibility, that is the fact to stop with this operator, is complex), know-how (by not maintaining the required skill, how to face in case of crisis?) or infrastructure (the network has to be operational to reach the data).

Externalization do improve the resiliency but this does not mean centralization nor dependency. To the contrary, resilience and non-dependency would encourage to build distributed local architectures that could ensure collectively their own resilience: in case a member fails, the others could supply. Moreover such architectures would have a lower impact on the environment and this is a crucial point. Indeed, computer architectures are concerned by the sustainability because they consume more and more energy, contributing themselves indirectly to some future crisis. In particular, the data-center model has to be questioned.

The Isorédu project will focus on the relationship between resilience, dependency and sustainability. As a case study, it will consider data storage and will propose a distributed data saving solution for local partners standing together to face crisis. For this purpose, life-cycle assessment will be studied on the proposed solutions.

The project is organized as follows:

- organizing a network of local partners to study use cases;

- defining a criteriology to characterize the non functional exigences of resilience, dependency and sustainability in order to deduce a methodology for designing resilient non-dependent and sustainable computing systems;

- test the methodology and the approach by designing a prototype of distributed data saving solution dedicated to local partners ensuring jointly their resilience;

- experiment this prototype in real situation in the aim of evaluation with the help of local partners.