The global fight for internet infrastructure control has heated up, driven by more international competition, increasing cyber attacks and instances of economic espionage. Following the Russia-Ukraine war and escalating US-China tensions, countries are now rushing to protect data flows and vulnerable critical infrastructure for the coming years. Rising concerns about dependence on foreign-controlled hosting, internet protocols (IPs) and peering are also emerging.
Furthermore, the increasing cost of internet connectivity, driven by the near depletion of IPv4 addresses, as well as the growing frequency of routing attacks such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijacks, have also heightened the need for countries in the European Union (EU) to focus on digital sovereignty. After years of outsourcing and bureaucracy, many are still in the draft strategy stage.
However, through a series of coordinated and innovative strategies – including IPv6 deployment, local control of IP space, private sector alignment and peering networks – Lithuania has been taking a highly proactive approach to future-proofing its internet infrastructure, improving digital sovereignty and national resilience.
How Lithuania is building internet infrastructure resilience
Lithuania’s post-Soviet past has played a significant role in shaping its bid for digital autonomy, which relies on viewing internet infrastructure as a state asset. A tech-first governance model combines public-private partnerships, infrastructure policy and national security.
Back in the early 2000s, the country was already investing significantly in nationwide digital identity, e-government services and secure infrastructure for public data. Now it is doubling down on IPv6 deployment at scale as part of a strategy to future-proof its internet infrastructure. And the country is actively trying to encourage full IPv6 adoption, when IPv6 adoption across Europe has been relatively slower so far.
This shift is likely to help decrease dependence on almost depleted IPv4 addresses, while securing long-term address availability. IPv6 networks are also more efficiently structured, with better redundancy and shorter routing paths, strengthening resistance to disruptions and failures.
“With globally unique addresses, IPv6 restores end-to-end connectivity, enabling more transparent communication and better performance. This eliminates the need for current complex workarounds like NAT due to IPv4 address limitations,” says Martin Butler, professor of digital transformation at Vlerick Business School. “This gives nations more control over their network infrastructure and supports the scale needed for future digital services.”
Leasing out dormant IP addresses
Lithuania is taking strategic control of its IP address space by leasing out dormant IP addresses through private sector companies like IPXO. The company claims to have the world’s largest IPv4 leasing market, with more than 300 million leasable IPs across all regional internet registries (RIRs).
IPXO’s co-founder, Vincentas Grinius, believes that out of 4.3 billion IP addresses, 25% are not visible on the internet at all, with a considerable portion of the remainder being badly managed.
With globally unique addresses, IPv6 restores end-to-end connectivity, enabling more transparent communication and better performance Martin Butler, Vlerick Business School
“It’s not about the shortage, it’s about how efficiently that resource is utilised. A lot of enterprises have a legacy space that some of them forgot about. Some of them have legacy networks where they have a different system and they are locked within those,” he says.
“Our aim is to step into a deeper understanding of how we can defragment their networks and give them that single source of truth. It’s to help enterprises optimise their networks and remove the hurdle of multiple tools,” adds Grinius.
Butler emphasises that as countries strive to achieve greater digital sovereignty, controlling data flows and IP address space has become vital.
“Local routing policies enable governments and ISPs [internet service providers] to align their network operations with domestic laws, enhance visibility in critical sectors, and reduce dependency on foreign infrastructure. These actions strengthen resilience and help mitigate security risks such as route hijacking,” he says.
Not only can this generate additional revenue, but it could also reduce the need to lease address space from foreign companies, while curbing black market leasing and IP hijacking.
Another step is building up routing and peering infrastructure by enhancing BGP route filtering, growing internet exchange points and supporting domestic peering. This helps decrease latency, keep traffic local and control the risks of foreign routing dependency, which is vital for both national security and performance.
Simultaneously, Lithuania is developing top-tier response infrastructure through sector-specific cyber protocols and its National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-LT), in partnership with NRD Cyber Security. This allows the country to export CERT design, cyber security frameworks and routing strategies to other countries, further strengthening its cyber resilience leadership.
Apart from IPXO and NRD Cyber Security, the Lithuanian government consistently funds, supports and partners with several other private sector firms and business incubators, such as Hostinger, Tesonet, Telesoftas and Kaunas Tech Park.
By designing and operating domestic core stack services, these companies can significantly decrease the need for global hyperscalers, while being aligned with sovereign goals.
According to Eiviltas Paraščiakas, head of communications at Hostinger, one of the company’s main advantages over hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud is speed. He said this unlocks lots of options, such as adapting to technology trends, delivering minimum viable products and experimenting with products.
He believes competitors would struggle to launch a product in a few weeks, as Hostinger did with its Horizons AI app platform, which simplifies web application development.
Kaunas Tech Park plays a key role in seeding and supporting Lithuania’s early-stage tech startups and scaleups. These work across cyber security, cloud-native and hosting technologies, the internet of things (IoT) and edge networking, among other areas. Through this collaborative system, Lithuania can scale up its digital infrastructure much faster than many of its EU peers.
What Europe could learn from Lithuania
One of the key takeaways from Lithuania’s internet infrastructure approach is that true sovereign digital resilience comes from first mastering control of the invisible but essential building blocks. Lithuania treats routing infrastructure, IP space, Domain Name System (DNS) and hosting as national and strategic assets, not just technical private sector tools. As such, the long-term resilience of these assets can be baked into the national digital agenda and routinely monitored and encouraged by the Ministry of the Economy and Innovation.
One of the key takeaways from Lithuania’s internet infrastructure approach is that true sovereign digital resilience comes from first mastering control of the invisible but essential building blocks
In contrast, several EU countries still outsource core infrastructure to foreign telecoms operators or hyperscalers. While their digital agendas are full of intention, they lag in implementation. Another lesson is to utilise dormant IP assets for leasing revenue, which can then be used for public infrastructure, research and development, and scientific ventures. This effectively reduces digital waste and decreases the internet’s carbon footprint.
Lithuania also demonstrates the benefits of fostering public-private tech partnerships with companies like IPXO, Tesonet, Hostinger and NRD Cyber Security. These firms highlight the multifold benefits of policy support, building products that strengthen national autonomy, like a global IP leasing marketplace, encrypted access and domestic hosting. By doing the same, the UK and EU could significantly reduce reliance on Chinese or US firms and enhance domestic internet infrastructure capabilities.
Lithuania’s strategy of exporting cyber resilience through sovereign infrastructure models could help other EU members and the UK develop themselves as global digital leaders as well. The country demonstrates the benefits of agility during initial-stage implementation of new internet infrastructure policies, through rapid deployment of IPv6 at scale, integrating national cyber architecture and changing registry policies. In addition, this could allow it to be much better equipped to deal with fast-evolving digital threats, unlike the UK, which is still bogged down by fragmented policies and red tape.
The challenges ahead
Yet even though Lithuania is making significant strides in internet infrastructure resilience, some hurdles remain. Butler points out that local IP space control and sovereign routing policies have their drawbacks: “Excessive centralisation or opaque filtering can undermine the internet’s open, distributed nature. Mandating that traffic stay within borders may reduce efficiency, increase latency and risk fragmentation outcomes that weaken rather than strengthen digital infrastructure.”
Yet despite impressive roll-out, Lithuanian IPv6 adoption across enterprise networks, consumer ISPs and regional governments is still somewhat patchy. This is mainly because several services and devices still depend heavily on IPv4.
Awareness of the benefits of IP address leasing is also slow, with Grinius noting: “It took us a lot of effort to educate the market that leasing is good and safe, if you have a safe environment to do that. A lot of the companies or government institutions, non-governmental organisations, have that old thinking, where you can’t do anything with the IP addresses within the third-party networks. We tried to change that because technologies are advancing, things are introduced faster and faster.”
With the country mainly relying on a few major firms, such as IPXO and Hostinger, for internet infrastructure, there is also a systemic risk in case of strategy changes or consolidation. A lack of domestic hyperscalers also means that some critical workloads still depend on foreign infrastructure, which can slow full digital sovereignty.
Similarly, Lithuania’s talent pool is currently seeing a high amount of brain drain to countries including the UK, Germany and the US, which often offer better salaries. This can have far-reaching impacts on sovereign infrastructure projects.
And thanks to a mention in Dan Brown’s new novel, The Secret of Secrets, the festival has gained even more global recognition. Just a few weeks after the release of Brown’s new bestseller set in contemporary Prague, viewers were able to see for themselves what drew the popular writer to the festival, which is the largest Czech and Central European showcase of digital art. In one passage, the Signal Festival has a cameo appearance when the novel’s protagonist recalls attending an event at the 2024 edition.
“We’re happy about it,” festival director Martin Pošta says about the mention. “It’s a kind of recognition.” Not that the event needed promotion, even in one of the most anticipated novels of recent years. The organizers have yet to share the number of visitors to the festival this year, but the four-day event typically attracts half a million visitors.
On the final day, there was a long queue in front of the monumental installation Tristan’s Ascension by American video art pioneer Bill Viola before it opened for the evening, even though it was a ticketed event. In the Church of St. Salvator in the Convent of St. Agnes, visitors could watch a Christ-like figure rise upwards, streams of water defying gravity along with him, all projected on a huge screen.
The festival premiere took place on the Vltava River near the Dvořák Embankment. Taiwan’s Peppercorns Interactive Media Art presented a projection on a cloud of mist called Tzolk’in Light. While creators of other light installations have to deal with the challenges of buildings—their irregular surfaces, decorative details, and awkward cornices—projecting onto water droplets is a challenge of a different kind with artists having to give up control over the resulting image. The shape and depth of the Peppercorns’ work depended on the wind at any given moment, which determined how much of the scene was revealed to viewers and how much simply blown away. The reward, however, was an extraordinary 3D spectacle reminiscent of a hologram—something that can’t be achieved with video projections on static and flat buildings.
Another premiere event was a projection on the tower of the Old Town Hall, created for the festival by the Italian studio mammasONica. It transformed the 230-foot structure into a kaleidoscope of blue, green, red, and white surfaces. A short distance away, on Republic Square, Peppercorns had another installation. On a circular LED installation, they projected a work entitled Between Mountains and Seas, which recounted the history of Taiwan.
Software development is associated with the idea of not reinventing the wheel, which means developers often select components or software libraries with pre-built functionality, rather than write code to achieve the same result.
There are many benefits of this approach. For example, a software component that is widely deployed is likely to have undergone extensive testing and debugging. It is considered tried and trusted, mature technology, unlike brand-new code, which has not been thoroughly debugged and may inadvertently introduce unknown cyber security issues into the business.
The Lego analogy is often used to describe how these components can be put together to build enterprise applications. Developers can draw on functionality made available through application programming interfaces (APIs), which provide programmatic access to software libraries and components.
Increasingly, in the age of data-driven applications and greater use of artificial intelligence (AI), API access to data sources is another Lego brick that developers can use to create new software applications. And just as is the case with a set of old-school Lego bricks, constructing the application from the numerous software components available is left to the creativity of the software developer.
A Lego template for application development
To take the Lego analogy a bit further, there are instructions, templates and pathways developers can be encouraged to follow to build enterprise software that complies with corporate policies.
A developer self-service platform provides a way for organisations to offer their developers almost pre-authorised assets, artefacts and tools that they can use to develop code Roy Illsley, Omdia
Roy Illsley, chief analyst, IT operations, at Omdia, defines an internal developer platform (IDP) as a developer self-service portal to access the tools and environments that the IT strategy has defined the organisation should standardise on. “A developer self-service platform provides a way for organisations to offer their developers almost pre-authorised assets, artefacts and tools that they can use to develop code,” he says.
The basic idea is to provide a governance framework with a suite of compliant tools. Bola Rotibi, chief of enterprise research at CCS Insight, says: “A developer self-service platform is really about trying to get a governance path.”
Rotibi regards the platform as “a golden path”, which provides developers who are not as skilled as more experienced colleagues a way to fast-track their work within a governance structure that allows them a certain degree of flexibility and creativity.
As to why offering flexibility to developers is an important consideration falls under the umbrella of developer experience and productivity. SnapLogic effectively provides modern middleware. It is used in digital transformation projects to connect disparate systems, and is now being repositioned for the age of agentic AI.
SnapLogic’s chief technology officer, Jeremiah Stone, says quite a few of the companies it has spoken to that identify as leaders in business transformation regard a developer portal offering self-service as something that goes hand-in-hand with digital infrastructure and AI-powered initiatives.
SnapLogic’s platform offers API management and service management, which manages the lifecycle of services, version control and documentation through a developer portal called the Dev Hub.
Stone says the capabilities of this platform extend from software developers to business technologists, and now AI users, who, he says, may be looking for a Model Context Protocol (MCP) endpoint.
Such know-how captured in a self-service developer portal enables users – whether they are software developers, or business users using low-code or no-code tooling – to connect AI with existing enterprise IT systems.
Enter Backstage
One platform that seems to have captured the minds of the developer community when it comes to developer self-service is Backstage. Having begun life internally at audio streaming site Spotify, Backstage is now an open source project managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
While many teams that implemented Backstage assumed that it would be an easy, free addition to their DevOps practices, that isn’t always the case. Backstage can be complex and requires engineering expertise to assemble, build and deploy Christopher Condo and Lauren Alexander, Forrester
Pia Nilsson, senior director of engineering at the streaming service, says: “At Spotify, we’ve learned that enabling developer self-service begins with standardisation. Traditional centralised processes create bottlenecks, but complete decentralisation can lead to chaos. The key is finding the middle ground – standardisation through design, where automation and clear workflows replace manual oversight.”
Used by two million developers, Backstage is an open source framework for building internal developer portals. Nilsson says Backstage provides a single, consistent entry point for all development activities – tools, services, documentation and data. She says this means “developers can move quickly while staying aligned with organisational standards”.
Nilsson points out that standardising the fleet of components that comprise an enterprise technology stack is sometimes regarded as a large migration effort, moving everyone onto a single version or consolidating products into one. However, she says: “While that’s a critical part of standardising the fleet, it’s even more important to figure out the intrinsic motivator for the organisation to keep it streamlined and learn to ‘self-heal’ tech fragmentation.”
According to Nilsson, this is why it is important to integrate all in-house-built tools, as well as all the developer tools the business has purchased, in the same IDP. Doing so, she notes, makes it very easy to spot duplication. “Engineers will only use what they enjoy using, and we usually enjoy using the stuff we built ourselves because it’s exactly what we need,” she says.
The fact that Backstage is a framework is something IT leaders need to consider. In a recent blog post, Forrester analysts Christopher Condo and Lauren Alexander warned that most IDPs are frameworks that require assembly: “While many teams that implemented Backstage assumed that it would be an easy, free addition to their DevOps practices, that isn’t always the case. Backstage can be complex and requires engineering expertise to assemble, build and deploy.”
However, Forrester also notes that commercial IDP options are now available that include an orchestration layer on top of Backstage. These offer another option that may be a better fit for some organisations.
AI in an IDP
As well as the assembly organisations will need to carry out if they do not buy a commercial IDP, AI is revolutionising software development, and its impact needs to be taken into account in any decisions made around developer self-service and IDP.
Spotify’s Nilsson believes it is important for IT leaders to figure out how to support AI tooling usage in the most impactful way for their company.
“Today, there is both a risk to not leveraging enough AI tools or having it very unevenly spread across the company, as well as the risk that some teams give in to the vibes and release low-quality code to production,” she says.
According to Nilsson, this is why the IT team responsible for the IDP needs to drive up the adoption of these tools and evaluate the impact over time. “At Spotify, we drive broad AI adoption through education and hack weeks, which we promote through our product Skill Exchange. We also help engineers use context-aware agentic tools,” she adds.
Looking ahead
In terms of AI tooling, an example of how developer self-service could evolve is the direction of travel SAP looks to be taking with its Joule AI copilot tool.
When structure, automation and visibility are built into the developer experience, you replace bottlenecks with flow and create an environment where teams can innovate quickly, confidently and responsibly Pia Nilsson, Spotify
CCS Insights’ Rotibi believes the trend to integrate AI into developer tools and platforms is an area of opportunity for developer self-service platforms. Among the interesting topics Rotibi saw at the recent SAP TechEd conference in Berlin was the use of AI in SAP Joule.
SAP announced new AI assistants in Joule, which it said are able to coordinate multiple agents across workflows, departments and applications. According to SAP, these assistants plan, initiate and complete complex tasks spanning finance, supply chain, HR and beyond.
“SAP Joule is an AI interface. It’s a bit more than just a chatbot. It is also a workbench,” says Rotibi. Given that Joule has access to the SAP product suite, she notes that, as well as providing access, Joule understands the products. “It knows all the features and functions SAP has worked on, and, behind the scenes, uses the best data model to get the data points the user wants,” she says.
Recognising that enterprise software developers will want to build their own applications and create their own integration between different pieces of software, she says SAP Joule effectively plays the role of a developer self-service portal for the SAP product suite.
Besides what comes next with AI-powered functionality, there are numerous benefits in offering developer self-service to improve the overall developer experience, but there needs to be structure and standards.
Nilsson says: “When structure, automation and visibility are built into the developer experience, you replace bottlenecks with flow and create an environment where teams can innovate quickly, confidently and responsibly.”
First a confession: I own more MoonSwatches than I care to admit. Never let it be said that WIRED does not walk the walk when it comes to recommending products—Swatch has assiduously extracted a considerable amount of cash from me, all in $285 increments. This was no doubt the Swiss company’s dastardly plan all along, to lure us in, then, oh so gently, get watch fans hooked. The horological equivalent of boiling a frog. It’s worked, too—Swatch has, so far, netted hundreds of millions of dollars from MoonSwatch sales.
But while I’ve been a fan of the Omega X Swatch mashup since we reported on exactly how the hugely lucrative collaboration came to be in the first place, I have never liked the iterative Moonshine Gold versions. Employing a sliver of Omega’s exclusive 18K pale yellow gold alloy in marginally different ways on each design, they seemed almost cynical—a way of milking the MoonSwatch superfans on the hunt to complete the set.
A hidden Snoopy message on the Cold Moon’s dial is revealed under UV light.
Photograph: Courtesy of Swatch
The MoonSwatch comes with a rubber strap upgrade over the original launch models.
Photograph: Courtesy of Swatch
Now, though, just when I thought I was done with MoonSwatch—having gone as far as to upgrade all of mine with official $45 color-matching rubber straps—Swatch has managed to ensnare me once again, and with a Moonshine Gold model: the new MoonSwatch Mission To Earthphase Moonshine Gold Cold Moon.
Clumsy moniker aside, this version takes the all-white 2024 Snoopy model (WIRED’s top pick of the entire collection), mixes it with the Earthphase MoonSwatches, and replaces the inferior original strap for a superior white and blue Swatch rubber velcro one. Aesthetically, it’s definitely a win, but this is not the Cold Moon’s party trick.
On each $450 Cold Moon MoonSwatch, a snowflake is lasered onto its Moonshine Gold moon phase indicator—and, just like a real snowflake, Swatch claims each one will be completely unique. When you consider the volumes of MoonSwatches Swatch produces each year, this is no mean feat.
The unique golden snowflakes appear on the moon phase dial of the Cold Moon.
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