On the importance of redundancy

I’m sure most people have heard about the cable breakage in the Middle East by now. But I’m sure that many CIO/CISOs were frustrated anyway – no matter how well they had planned redundancy into their networks, they’re ultimately at the “whim” of the big cross-continent bandwidth providers. It’s expensive to drop cables onto the ocean floor, put up satellites or string cables across a continent just under the surface of the land – and there are precious few of these lines.

The incident in the Middle East is illustrative of thinking about the entire Internet, not just what comes into your building. For some companies and industries, this matters – and not being able to support your customers in the US because the Internet connection to India is down is one of those industries. For others, they are happy to maintain connectivity within their region and are just fine if a cross-continent line is cut. If it matters to your industry, you should consider learning where all the underseas cables are, and consider that when you make your disaster recovery plans, or even during your initial location planning.