Members aren't RIPE for a new charging scheme, though
Europe's internet registry is abandoning its cloud migration plans over geopolitical risk, but reversing course now means rebuilding the resilient, secure infrastructure it needs. The RIPE Network Coordination Centre - which oversees the regional internet registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia - had, like many organizations, adopted a "cloud-first" strategy that involved moving move core services and databases to cloud providers.But, as with many European organizations, the arrival of the Trump administration delivered a wake-up call, prompting it to reassess the risks of relying on US-based hyperscalers for parts of its infrastructure.
In a blog post, RIPE Managing Director Hans Petter Holen says returning to the previous status quo is no longer an option - stakeholder expectations about the security, stability, and resilience of services have risen, among other things.
In a presentation at last month's RIPE NCC General Meeting, Holen said much of the organization's infrastructure needs an overhaul, requiring a jump in capital expenditure (capex) to levels not seen in years, before the cloud-first strategy was adopted."To start with, we will need to replace hardware that has reached, or in some cases passed, the end of its lifecycle. This is the result of trade-offs between capex and opex over the period in which we were focused on cloud deployments, as well as various assumptions and decisions about how this balance would evolve over the long term," he said.RIPE needs to consider its datacenter footprint - the number and location of facilities - while minimizing interdependencies between them to allow for expansion into additional sites as needed.Geographically redundant storage and backups are also needed, Holen said, along with a decision on future virtualization platforms that limit vendor lock-in risks.Despite these challenges, the organization expects to complete a migration to a greenfield deployment by 2028 at an additional cost of €5 million, effectively returning capital spending to levels last seen before 2020.To fund this, RIPE will need to balance internal cost savings against membership fees. Holen said he is aware that some members are concerned about the fees they've paid in recent years and don't want to see further rises.
