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: no disruption of operations or services to our customers as a result of a major undersea cable cut near Alexandria due to the diversity in cable routes and service providers built into our network,” says a Genpact spokesperson.

“It wasn’t a disaster, but a problem that should be addressed. Internet service providers and their customers incurred huge losses. If a BPO had 100MB capacity, it was using only 40MB. We must take a lesson from such incidents,” says Internet Service Providers Association of India president Rajesh Chharia.

As India is connected to two oceans, with the capacity equally divided on the Western coast and the Eastern coast, it managed to put on a brave face, whereas countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, struggled to restore connectivity. About 60-70% bandwidth of the Atlantic Ocean, which was affected due to the disruptions, was shifted to the Pacific side for those 10 days. Though this allowed people access to the internet, connection was a bit slow.

“Many areas of the world are connected by a relatively small number of internet cables, and when several failures happen simul- taneously, either by accident or deliberate attack, it seriously affects the ability to conduct business. These events should remind IT and business managers that they always need to prepare for catastrophes with service redundancy and business resumption plans,” says Roberta J Witty, VP-research, Gartner.

Some traffic in these circumstances can be rerouted, but that’s not always the best bet, according to Witty. Satellite backup can be an alternative but it is expensive, and performance may not be good enough for applications that need near-real-time responses. About 90% of internet traffic is routed through undersea cables, and only 10% through satellites. In case of damage to undersea cables, analysts suggest picking up telecom operators that have redundant undersea routes to avoid using satellite as much as possible. Needless to say, internet and phone traffic has to be limited to mission-critical business only.