Just as a house in Florida is built to withstand a mild hurricane, or a house in California is built to withstand a mild earthquake, a network should be built to withstand the mild spikes in traffic, the loss of redundancy due to fiber cuts or the inevitable hardware failure. As you can see, the one commonality here is preparedness against the unknowns. Just as construction has learned to adapt to mother nature’s challenges by way of learning from the past and taking preventive measures for the future by implementing stricter building codes, our infrastructure engineers and architects should heed the same warnings that the COVID-19 pandemic presented in our everyday lives. The challenges that were seen on day one were that of people working from home facing the congestion of their home Internet service providers or the inability to connect to their office VPN due to hardware and/or licensing capacity constraints or under provisioned circuit bandwidth.
As the weeks have passed, companies have mitigated these issues and people are able to work from home with little to no concerns. Now, it’s time to look at the other side of this equation, how do cloud service or content providers ensure that they are building ahead of the next pandemic or AN unforeseen event?