OPINION | Chokepoint Hormuz is not just about oil; it’s also the vulnerable undersea digital corridor

An aerial view of the Iranian shores and Port of Bandar Abbas in the strait of Hormuz

The recent escalation of conflict in the Middle East has shocked many, yet it was far from unforeseen. While media and resilience professionals focus on missile strikes, regime dynamics, travel disruptions, energy supply interruptions, cyberattacks etc., a series of underappreciated systemic vulnerabilities with a medium-to-high probability of event occurrence and potentially catastrophic impact demand urgent attention.

Hidden Chokepoints: More than oil and missiles

The Strait of Hormuz is widely recognised as the world’s most critical oil chokepoint. However, it is equally vital for the Gulf’s food imports, with over 130 ships passing daily carrying not only hydrocarbons but also a significant share of the region’s imported food and fertilisers.

Even less discussed are the subsea internet cables traversing the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. These cables form essential digital corridors connecting Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, underpinning financial transactions, cloud applications, industrial monitoring, airline operations, container tracking, trading systems, and crisis communications. Damage to these cables, as witnessed previously, have caused disruptions across the region, forcing traffic rerouting, spiking latency, and straining networks.  

Repair efforts are slow and complex, requiring secure maritime access and specialised vessels, which are limited in number.

The consequences extend far beyond internet slowdowns; a regional kinetic conflict can rapidly escalate into a global digital continuity crisis.

Recent drone strikes damaging AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain further underscore the immediacy of this threat.

Hormuz is not just geography, it represents an ecosystem

The true choke point in regional trade extends beyond the physical Strait of Hormuz to encompass a complex ecosystem of interdependent services critical to maritime operations, including marine insurance, port labor availability, bunkering, scheduling software, satellite communications, customs processing, and vessel repositioning.

Even brief disruptions within these domains can trigger cascading effects such as force majeure claims, vessel scarcity and the repricing of war-risk insurance. Notably, insurers possess the capacity to impede trade flows without any physical damage occurring.

In the current context, Iran neither directed insurers to withdraw coverage nor holds practical authority to compel their reinstatement. The restoration of war-risk insurance necessitates comprehensive rebuilding of risk models, voyage by voyage re-underwriting, repricing of treaty capacity, and a rigorous actuarial reassessment of the prevailing threat environment.

Water scarcity is vulnerable to weaponisation

Water security presents another critical vulnerability. Much of the Middle East depends heavily on desalination plants for freshwater: up to 60% in many areas. These plants require uninterrupted power, specialised membranes, chemicals, spare parts, and secure coastal zones. Damage to a single power substation or logistics corridor can trigger a drinking-water crisis, rapidly escalating into social breakdown.

Helium represents another risk element

Moreover, the conflict threatens supplies of specialty materials such as helium, with Qatar playing a pivotal role in global helium production. Disruptions here link Middle East instability to global semiconductor manufacturing, which underpins AI and chip production. This creates a compute constraint risk that many executives overlook, mistakenly equating conflict risk solely with energy costs.

How businesses can minimise risks flowing from Middle East

Mature resilience teams today manage visible risks such as colleague safety, duty of care logistics, cyber threats, supply chain disruptions, and crisis communications. However, given the complex and interconnected risks emerging from the Middle East conflict, resilience professionals must broaden their focus beyond the obvious.

It is imperative to appoint a Chief Geopolitical Officer-a board-level executive tasked with translating geopolitical volatility into informed strategic decisions. Businesses should build in-house geopolitical risk and crisis management capabilities or establish enduring partnerships with specialist consulting firms.

Modern crisis teams need near real-time intelligence integration, combining location specific geopolitical data feeds, situational alerts, cyber threat intelligence, and colleague safety trackers.

Business Impact Analysis and risk registers must be refreshed to identify hidden chokepoints such as subsea cables, desalination power dependencies, cloud regions, insurers, and specialty inputs.

Distinguishing redundancy from resilience is critical-critical suppliers sharing the same vulnerable corridor do not constitute true resilience.

Insurance must be treated as an operational dependency, not merely a treasury concern. Resilience teams should advise on pre-negotiated alternatives, clear war-exclusion analyses, and scenario-based claims, readiness embedded in contracts and policies.

A volatile geopolitical backdrop calls for neutrality

In such a volatile geopolitical environment, businesses should also maintain strict political neutrality and avoid over-identification with any single regional actor.

In the Middle East’s complex geopolitical landscape, durable influence is often built quietly through long term relationships with governments, partners and local communities rather than through overt public positioning during crises.

The next strategic shock in the Middle East may not manifest as a dramatic missile strike but rather as a slow, cascading failure of interconnected systems such as degraded internet, stalled desalination, shortages of specialty chemicals, withdrawn war-risk insurance, cloud outages, or fertiliser deficits etc.

(Maitreya Buddha Samantaray is the convenor of the Crisis Intelligence Community (CIC) and a senior strategic risk consultant focusing on organisational resilience.)

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.