“This means that an enterprise needs to worry about more than just what its own servers are doing. It needs to consider what happens when its cloud provider, operating system, identity provider, database, external APIs and on-premises systems interpret the same moment differently,” Kolev said. “This is exactly the type of systemic technology risk that worries CIOs: individually, each dependency may look manageable, but on a global scale there are millions of interconnected systems maintained by different organizations, written in different eras and operating under different assumptions.”
Justin Grace, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence, also said he hoped the proposal would be accepted.
“I think this is one of those cases where delaying what appears to be the technically correct answer may actually be a more responsible engineering decision. At some point, you have to ask whether maintaining the relationship between civil time and the Earth’s rotation to the second is worth introducing operational risk into financial systems, telecommunications networks, cloud platforms, energy infrastructure, transportation systems and countless other technologies that depend on precise synchronization,” Grace said. “I think for the vast majority of enterprise technology this is not the case.”