Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Whether it's prepping for thermonuclear war or downloading a podcast before a road trip, you need a plan B when the proverbial hits the fan. You need things to keep working when everything goes wrong - or, you know, when your internet dies on the subway. Our reliance on cloud architecture and distant servers means even your most basic app doesn’t work anymore without a connection, let alone the systems that power our world. 

Resilience isn’t optional, it’s essential. Modern society doesn’t work without computers. Alec Trevelyan knew the big picture when he planned to set off the Goldeneye. “It’s not just erasing bank records, it’s everything on every computer…tax records, stock market, credit ratings, land registries, criminal records.” - and as you might imagine, the threat surface has grown immeasurably since 1995. 

The digital architecture of society is everywhere. The world now runs on SaaS platforms, IoT devices and cloud-hosted infrastructure. Global logistics, healthcare systems, energy grids, autonomous vehicles, supply chains, emergency response services, smart homes and cities, telecommunications - and yes your Spotify. One cut cable, one nasty cyber-attack, and suddenly society is in the stone age.

Why Resilient Systems are Essential Everywhere

Music apps and podcasts may sound like tongue in cheek examples, but they are not. The principle of resilient systems isn’t just about preparing for crisis, but for incompetence. It’s not just about shoring up utility against apocalypse, but also against annoyance. It’s not just your music failing to work on a subway, but your sales team locked out of a CRM at the end of a busy quarter, or a work presentation vanishing into the ether due to a cloud server being down. These aren’t hypothetical disasters, but the everyday suffering of millions of people and thousands of companies. We need a new approach. There is a better way. Here are just a few examples:

Manufacturing: Localized data management ensures robot assembly lines keep running during natural or manmade disasters.

Business Operations: Offline-ready document editing and collaboration tools that eliminate reliance on expensive always on SaaS platforms and accounting software with local backups ensures consistent access to essential financial data.

Software Development: Distributed version control allows developers to continue working, even if a central repository goes offline and reduces the risk of bottlenecks.

Sales and Administration: Local-first CRM caches ensure critical client information remains accessible during disruptions.

Game Development: Local rendering and distributed project backups reduce risks during cyber threats.

Military Systems: Drones, satellites, supply chains and strategic command can continue to operate independently if critical data management servers are crippled by enemy actions or battlefield climate changes. 

Across industries, the absence of resilient systems is costing billions in lost productivity, and trillions in lost opportunities. 

The Loss of Sovereignty and Security

As it stands, for many companies and the teams that work for them, if your software service fails or grinds to a halt, so does your business. The computer has been slowly morphing away from a self-reliant and sovereign device packed with utility into a dumb hardware client dependent on external services. The aggregation of function has been drawn inexorably away from the devices themselves to server clusters in far off lands with keys held by distant corporations - the foreign kings that rule you. 

The last few decades have all been about these centralized entities delivering various SaaS functionality while removing the ability, authority and sovereignty for our devices to do it themselves - for us, the owners, to act independently with our applications or our data. And with that, also by stealth, the security and resilience of our systems are often no longer in our control. We traded sovereignty for convenience, and undermined resilience as a result. The interdependability of so much of modern computer architecture can mean that if one pillar goes down, say under a cyber-attack, natural disaster, or simple human error, the entire tower falls.

We need to rebuild resilience. For global safety, international commerce, and for individual users. To do that, we need device networks to be wholly sovereign and capable of staying on and working even if central servers fail. We must create Local-First software and autonomous utilities powered by the devices that deliver it. We need to rethink our entire approach to computers, with sovereign resilient device networks that always work and don’t rely on anything but themselves.

Source Network is that new approach. The distributed data management enabled across Local Edge networks is the foundational layer for always-on applications that deliver no matter what.

How Source Creates Resilient Systems

Our distributed data stack means developers can create applications with inherent resilience to catastrophe. DefraDB ensures data is always available, LensVM means data is adaptable, and SourceHub makes it accountable. Storage, processing, secrets management, auditing - Source Network takes these fragile centralized systems and replaces them with robust self-sufficient networks. 

Data availability is the critical component to always on functionality. If you don’t have the data - nothing works. DefraDB uses CRDTs to resolve conflicts between collaborators (be it device or individual) on data, and the P2P layer ensures synchronization across devices in the event that central servers are offline - if your application is even using one anymore. DefraDB means that the data needed by applications running on devices can be managed on the devices themselves. 

Even if part of your device fleet is sabotaged in some way, the remaining devices can continue to function and continually sync with whatever remains in the Local Edge network - and even become aware of potential catastrophe by gathering intel not from a far off bottlenecked central server, but from others nearby. A traffic light system can glean from other lights nearby about a recent car crash and divert the flow of cars. A satellite system can learn of inclement weather blocking coverage and automatically readjust its orbit from its neighbor in the stars, rather than waiting for critical intel from mission control on the ground before it can act.

LensVM is about making that data adaptable, seamlessly transforming data across devices. Edge Device networks might need to scale fast in an emergency, with a sudden need to onboard thousands of willing devices as a response to acute crises. A company may, for example, deploy thousands of sensors in response to an earthquake to track potential further tremors. LensVM’s data transformation abilities mean all devices can be made interoperable and conformant to a single data structure, and it opens the potential for powerful horizontal scaling of applications for commercial or critical need.  

Of course, resilience is also about security. Orbis Secrets Management engine provides non-custodial key management, DIDs for self-sovereign identity, and the ability to create complex relation-based authorization systems so that data can be secured and accessed only by who, or what, is allowed. This access is not wholesale either, the way a server hands out permissions for data it otherwise has total access to. Rather, edge devices on the network can only access the exact data they need to function, and nothing more, letting developers create and enforce trustless access policies right across their organization of people and devices.

SourceHub, the blockchain, ties this together. In the event of failure, recovery is paramount. The blockchain acts as a trust audit layer and accounting device to maintain data integrity and provide an immutable and ongoing record of how data was interacted with. Whether it's tracing the source of a human error that crashed the application, or the exact moment of a cyber-attack, SourceHub lets crucial applications recover fast and maintain resilience even in the face of disaster. 

Distributed Defense against Disaster 

The four pillars of our stack are all entirely distributed in operation. Their upkeep is maintained by the very devices they run on and the decentralized nodes that maintain them. There is no central server. There is no cable to cut. Even if the internet goes down, devices can make use of any connectivity to continually sync their data and make the application running on them work and, when internet is restored, the application can use SourceHub and P2P syncing of DefraDB and the CRDTs to resolve themselves back to an effective operational state. By using our distributed data management stack, developers can build applications that are completely independent of the cloud (but they don’t have to be!), completely divorced from reliance on central servers, and where the data that powers them is entirely sovereign to its owners. Although most developers will set up their fleets so that a substantial percentage will need to remain viable for their application to work, should a developer set it so that every device replicates all application data, then even if 99 devices out of 100 in your network fail, the remaining device can be a seed to rollout another 999 devices, with no absolute failure of service even during critical moments. Truly resilient systems are possible.

Source Network creates sovereign systems that don’t fail, a new type of always-on Local-First connectivity in a deeply fractured world.