During the month of June, well-known hyperscalers experienced widespread outages. These outages can impact hundreds if not thousands of customers, causing operational and financial inefficiencies for businesses. To mitigate the risk of outages and downtime, companies must take a look at their backup systems and understand if they are fully supported in the case of inclement weather or human interference.
Hyperscalers are companies who operate at immense scales, providing cloud computing services and infrastructure on a global level. These companies utilize data centers to support the enormous amount of data processing and storage used in their daily operations and include corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. Data centers hold these companies’ computer servers, storage systems, networking equipment, and other infrastructure components in a controlled environment, usually a warehouse-like structure. Continuing uninterrupted service requires the data center to be “on,” meaning connected to power with multiple routes transferring data continuously. An outage can be catastrophic for a data center, resulting in downed services, lost revenue, and, occasionally, damage to critical data.
The Problem
Outages can occur for a number of natural phenomena like earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes. However, now the industry is also dealing with the threat of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, a cybercrime in which an outside entity floods a server with internet traffic. This results in users being unable to access connected online services and sites.
Hybrid Solutions
In uncertain times, a hybrid solution could be a company’s best bet for protecting uptime. Utilizing a combination of cloud services and colocation can be the answer for ensuring redundancy and resiliency for data center operators and their customers — no matter what might be thrown at them.
Through cloud services, companies can distribute their services across multiple, geographically diverse data centers, reducing the risk of a single point of failure. In the event of an outage at one data center, applications and data can seamlessly transition to another facility, ensuring continuity of service.
Colocation, the other half of the equation, provides the advantage of housing critical infrastructure in multiple resilient sites. Providers who stock multiple carrier connections and diverse network routes can maintain connectivity even if one experiences an outage. Businesses that work with data center operators who utilize a “backbone” of multiple sites gain access not only to a resilient and fortified environment but also to the redundancy of their data backed up in numerous safeholds. This significantly reduces the risk of service outages, ensuring the availability and integrity of their infrastructure and data.
How Bluebird Network Does It
Bluebird Network utilizes two geographically diverse data centers — their Data Center in the Quad Cities, Illinois, and the Bluebird Network Underground Data Center in Springfield, Missouri. These facilities are equipped with redundant power supplies, backup generators, advanced cooling systems, and robust network connectivity, minimizing the likelihood of outages caused by infrastructure failures. Simply put, the redundancy of both sites minimizes the chance of a total service outage.
By combining cloud and colocation, providers like Bluebird Network establish a resilient and scalable infrastructure that provides redundancy, fault tolerance, and high availability.
This hybrid approach could be the most effective way to address the threat of service outages, ensuring uninterrupted operations and enhancing overall business continuity.
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