> The same thing you do if physical tax/medical/financial records get lost in a fire, or any other data for that matter.
The thing you fail to grasp is the resilience of physical records. Imagine Germany trying to take down England's records during World War I, one hundred years ago. The destruction of merely 3-5% of all relevant documents would have required the coordinated strikes of hundreds if not thousands of arsonists, all of whom would need to be part of an even bigger spy network. That's for England proper; you might be able to scale it up to Scotland and Walles, but it would be completely unimaginable to pull this off accross the whole British Empire.
Today, it might be harder to take down one hospital, but once you have gone that far, scale it up to national level should be pretty feasible.
> Imagine that your monoculture crop could develop immunity to a new disease within hours, days or weeks
You never have opened a priority bug in one of the big software companies, have you?
If properly backed up digital records are even more resilient, and it's not like this is a new concept. Banks are incredibly resilient when it comes to backups, for example. As are most of the major tech companies. Sure other institutions like hospitals and some underfunded government agencies might need to catch up, but once the will is there the technology is just waiting to be implemented.
Not to mention the insecure institutions are insecure in different ways. Whatever methods used to take down one hospital is unlikely to work on the next, although standardized National Healthcare systems like the NHS might be more vulnerable to such things.
Opening a priority bug is an entirely different animal than responding to an active attack. If something was able to shut down AWS, Google, a bunch of hospitals, or any other critical service, it gets immediate attention and reaction. Humans become incredibly productive once shit hits the fan.
> If properly backed up digital records are even more resilient, and it's not like this is a new concept.
If people would be willing and able to make proper digital records, the Cloud would not exist. Actually, most of the technology stacks in use today do not make any sense until you consider the fact that a very large segment of the market wants to have all the goodies IT-fairy-godmother can provide, but are too damned stingy to pay for even 10% of the cost.
Your characterization of Banks is correct, but irrelevant. In many ways they are the perfect IT customer: deep pockets, an inner culture that values detail orientation and rational risk assesment, appreciation of external expertise, etc. Most organizations are very not like this.
Healthcare IT, in particular, are the stuff of nightmares. A culture of bikeshedding, - excesive regulation of what systems ought to do, plus borderline criminal negligence of the implementation details, - reliance on obsolete OSes that cannot be updated anymore, needlessly large attack vectors... do I need to say more?
The thing you fail to grasp is the resilience of physical records. Imagine Germany trying to take down England's records during World War I, one hundred years ago. The destruction of merely 3-5% of all relevant documents would have required the coordinated strikes of hundreds if not thousands of arsonists, all of whom would need to be part of an even bigger spy network. That's for England proper; you might be able to scale it up to Scotland and Walles, but it would be completely unimaginable to pull this off accross the whole British Empire.
Today, it might be harder to take down one hospital, but once you have gone that far, scale it up to national level should be pretty feasible.
> Imagine that your monoculture crop could develop immunity to a new disease within hours, days or weeks
You never have opened a priority bug in one of the big software companies, have you?