30 November 2022
Craig Patterson, SVP of global channels, Aryaka
The challenge of maintaining a robust and reliable global network is no small task. The cyber threat landscape is ever evolving after all. But, as tensions around the world intensify, physical threats are evolving too.
Recent damage to the Shetland Isle’s SHEFA-2 undersea cabling, as well as three acts of vandalism to a cable located in Marseille, have reaffirmed the need for enterprises to rely less on carriers and ISPs, and to put their own protections in place to ensure 24/7 uptime.
Your service provider will obviously want to get your services up and running as soon as possible, but that could be a matter of weeks! Having your own failsafe in place ensures you're not relying on others and can handle whatever challenges fall at your feet.
For example, on 11 October 2022, disruption to services was first noticed on a subsea fibre cable between the Shetland and Faroe Islands due to a broken cable. Then on 19 October, a second break was uncovered between Shetland and the Scottish mainland.
These kinds of disruptions are nothing new. In 2021, over 4km of Norwegian subsea cable vanished without a trace. The cause in subsea cabling scenarios is usually fishing boats, catching cables along with produce as they trawl the sea floor. However, there are other, more severe, scenarios to consider too such as foreign powers sabotaging critical infrastructure for geopolitical gain.
Trawlers were blamed for the Norwegian outage, and a maritime research vessel was recorded in Shetland’s waters around the time of the most recent outage, which would correlate. No matter any rumours, accidents, and foreign interference both need to be considered as part of disaster recovery strategies, to ensure networks can adapt in the face of any potential pathway outages.
And if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the future is unpredictable.
The next infrastructure outage at such a scale may be on land, in a completely different area of the world, and for a near-infinite number of reasons. But no matter what the cause or culprit, enterprises need to guarantee 24/7 uptime or risk going dark until a solution is found. SD-WAN does just that, especially a fully managed solution, enabling enterprises to reroute traffic through whatever connectivity services are still available, whether fixed line or wireless.
Whether outages are found in the underlying infrastructure, or last-mile services, path replication and failover functionality allow enterprises to plan for the worst, intelligently redirecting data, so it continues to reach its destination.
That’s why it’s so important that providers of managed SD-WAN services explore disaster recovery scenarios with their customers, consistently reviewing and improving any aspect of the network stack where optimisations can be found, and lessons can be learnt.
Furthermore, when SD-WAN converges with a robust portfolio of SASE products – SWG (Secure Web Gateway), Firewall and a Zero Trust architecture – enterprises can protect themselves from both the physical and virtual challenges presented to network orchestrators.
