John Pescatore

For the second time this year, undersea cables in the Mediterranean have been cut, causing temporary disruption and degradation in the Middle East and Southern Asia. This will surely spin off more discussions of attack vs. accident, but the cause doesn’t really matter – the effect is the issue. If you outsource your call center or data center somewhere for cost reduction, did you have requirements about bandwidth redundancy to prevent service outages? Or at least SLAs that would require redundancy?

To be clear, the issue is bandwidth redundancy not connectivity redundancy. Years ago, large data centers who used multiple fiber optic connections from multiple carriers learned that such a strategy did help when a local backhoe took out a local fiber run, but it did not help when a far away backhoe (or trawler net or dragging ship anchor) took out a fiber run that both carriers relied on for backbone connectivity.

Just a reminder that in reality more than 75% of denial of service events will always be due to the choices we make vs. DoS attacks.

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