Recently, the IT leadership team at a large global bank was sharing worries about the impact of regional geo-political events and subsea cable cuts on their network’s resiliency. Since several of the bank’s mission-critical applications depend on a high-performance network, they had decided it was time to deploy secondary and tertiary network backbones to boost resiliency.
The concerns of this bank aren’t unique; in fact, network resiliency is critical for organizations across industries. A fast, secure network keeps applications working and ensures business continuity. Most enterprises have distributed users and applications across the globe. To stay competitive and protect their businesses, they must ensure that the right data can get to the right places in the right timeframe. In addition, they face growing pressure to ensure resiliency and business continuity from regulations like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)[1] and the NIS2 Directive[2] in the EU.
Network outages can directly impact business operations, causing disruptions, poor customer experiences and loss of reputation. They can also affect the bottom line, leading to fines or financial losses. According to the Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2024, significant or severe outages can cost more than $1 million.[3] Building more resilient global networks protects the future of a business.
The threats and challenges to network resiliency
According to the same Uptime Institute report, “network-related issues are the largest single cause of IT service outages.”[4] Network outages can be caused by design or configuration problems, hardware limitations, power outages, capacity issues, software problems or environmental threats.
Today, the world is seeing unprecedented disruptions to global connectivity. These include threats such as:
- Subsea cable damage due to human activities or natural disasters, such as the Red Sea cable cuts earlier in 2024
- Climate change and extreme weather events
- Power grid instability
- Geopolitical events that increase risk
- Security breaches
All these challenges make network resiliency more critical than ever. Networks need to be designed with redundancy to handle unplanned outages and prevent application downtime. While there have always been challenges, the risks to networks today are higher, and the consequences of a network outage—including costs to the business—are higher too.
3 ways to design a more resilient global network
There are many ways to build more resilient networks and prepare for potential outages. More and more organizations are taking advantage of software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities to design for resiliency. Some follow a hybrid approach using both physical and virtual networking solutions.
While not an exhaustive list, here are three ways to improve network resiliency:
1. Design a distributed, redundant network architecture.
Deploying infrastructure in different locations is one way to boost network resiliency. That way, if there’s a network outage in one region due to a natural disaster or geopolitical event, the other regions stay online to ensure application uptime. This approach supports a geo-redundant architecture.
2. Create a secondary or tertiary network backbone.
If your primary network backbone is an MPLS network or is through a network service provider (NSP), you can create a secondary, or even tertiary, backbone using SDN. Using a virtual networking solution for a redundant backbone has additional benefits: you can spin up connections very quickly (much faster than acquiring new hardware), and the backbone can be programmable to deliver better performance, efficiency and proactive security. This approach can be used for both local and geo-redundancy.
3. Use multicloud networking to back up critical data.
Most organizations are already using multicloud architectures to help reduce dependency on a single provider. With a multicloud approach, you can maintain backups or distributed workloads across multiple clouds, improving redundancy and eliminating single points of failure. If you use multiple public clouds, you can use cloud-to-cloud routing to quickly reroute traffic away from problematic areas to ensure seamless user experiences during outages or performance issues. Multicloud connectivity using private interconnection solutions can support local or geo-redundancy.
Solve for network resiliency with Equinix Fabric
All three of the resiliency approaches described above can be deployed using a virtual interconnection service that delivers fast failover and responsiveness, thus helping mitigate damage quickly should an outage occur. Equinix Fabric®, our software-defined interconnection solution, enables private connections running over a purpose-built Layer 2 network. You can use Equinix Fabric to create a highly responsive, adaptable and resilient global network, delivered as a service. A minimum of four NSPs provide the underlying network for Equinix Fabric, so it has excellent built-in network redundancy. It also offers a range of security features, high-availability solutions and uses automation.
If you’re looking for better network resiliency across locations, you can use Equinix Fabric to create a Layer 2 Data Center Interconnect (DCI) between two or more Equinix Fabric locations. Equinix Fabric Cloud Router—our on-demand virtual routing service—provides dynamic routing capabilities, so you can re-route data to the fastest, most secure path, if there are any issues on the original route. It establishes private Layer 3 connectivity between clouds, colocation and other Equinix services. You can also create a regional or global IP-WAN using Equinix Fabric Cloud Router.
Banking customer creates secondary network backbone
The global bank we mentioned at the start of this blog post decided to use Equinix Fabric to create a secondary network backbone connecting its colocation infrastructure in Asia, Europe and North America, as well as edge markets. The solution complements their existing MPLS network, which is delivered by their partner NSPs. With Equinix Fabric, the bank can choose deterministic routing through the customer portal and control which path its data traverses. This also enables data compliance and security, ensuring that certain customer data doesn’t leave a certain region and avoiding non-secure areas or networks.
With software-defined interconnection, the bank can connect their applications, clouds, users and security services quickly and easily, in an agile and resilient network. They’re better prepared to keep their mission-critical applications online, even if an event in the region causes an unplanned network outage.
Figure 1: A resilient global network using Equinix Fabric
Figure 2: Close-up of network redundancies in Europe
Gain confidence in your network
Given the risks to networks today, organizations need to be confident in the resiliency and security of their business networks. If something goes wrong, the costs can be high. You can’t afford to lose customer data or have downtime in your mission-critical applications.
The network is the foundation of your infrastructure—it’s essential that it work. Equinix is uniquely positioned to help global enterprises design more resilient networks to protect the future of their business.
Learn more about how Equinix Fabric can support a resilient global network by downloading the data sheet.
[1] Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority.
[2] Directive on measures for a high common level of cybersecurity across the Union (NIS2 Directive), European Commission.
[3] Annual Outage Analysis 2024: Executive Summary, Uptime Institute, March 2024.
[4] Annual Outage Analysis 2024: Executive Summary, Uptime Institute, March 2024.
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