18 August 2022

Redundant, neutral, and diverse digital infrastructure – how to build a resilient digital enterprise

Resilience is essential for keeping data traffic safe and flowing. It refers to the ability to maintain acceptable service levels in the case of a disruption to business operations, critical processes, or your digital infrastructure. And for digital business, high availability of its connectivity infrastructure is essential.

Minimize the impact of outages

If your business is a truly digital enterprise, day-to-day operations depend on fail-safe transportation of data – be that customer data, maintenance of systems, or analytics. In the real world however, incidents and outages are a part of the picture, and it is necessary to build connectivity in a way that minimizes the impact of these.

Through building multiple layers of redundancy – in terms of technology, geography, and also in terms of partners – a company can design its critical digital infrastructure to be more resistant to disruptions.

How to achieve resiliency

So how to achieve this? Redundancy, neutrality, and diversity in digital infrastructure are key to the greatest level of resilience. This must be factored into the design of enterprise connectivity from top to bottom. We can take DE-CIX as an example: Physical redundancy is an essential hallmark of the design of our platforms, necessary to support the SLAs we guarantee our customers.

The distributed nature of our platforms, accessible in many geographically dispersed data centers, together with the redundant deployment of our own core and edge infrastructure, protects against disruption, and guarantees availability even in case of local outages.

We also make sure connections between our sites are as diverse as possible, taking multiple different routes, so that even in the case of local outages along one pathway, connectivity can be maintained between locations. And this applies globally: we share our capacities across different sub-sea cable routes and ensure that these paths do not overlap at any point. This way we ensure redundant and non-overlapping cable connections between every data center where our platform is accessible, creating a highly robust and resilient, failure-safe interconnection environment.

This best practice model can also be applied to enterprises to ensure resilient connectivity for your critical data flows and value chains – the foundation of business continuity in the digital economy.