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World Backup Day 2025 - Why "Redundancy" Is a Good Thing and What It Means for Your Business

Dr. Thomas King
DE-CIX

When the powers that be decided that March 31 was going to be World Backup Day in 2011, it was meant to be a joke. Why? The next day is April Fool's Day … Lose your data and the best case scenario is, well, you know the word — but at worst, it is game over. And so World Backup Day has traditionally carried a very simple yet powerful message for businesses: Backup. Your. Data.

A large part of this backing up, is "data redundancy" — the idea that storing multiple copies of data in separate locations will offer greater resilience in the event of an outage or network security breach. Yet, as workloads have moved into the cloud, and AI and SaaS applications have become dominant vehicles for productivity, the concept of "redundancy" has started to expand.

Image
World Backup Day

Contingency Cloud Connectivity

A study in 2023 found that 94% of enterprises use cloud services, which is hardly surprising, and 67% of enterprise infrastructure is now cloud-based. Given this reliance on virtualization, connectivity has become mission critical.

Businesses not only need contingency plans for their data, but contingency plans for their connectivity. And so relying on a single-lane, vendor-locked connectivity pathway is a bit like only backing your data up in one place — once that solution fails, you guessed it — it's game over.

In 2025, roughly 85% of software used by the average business is Software as a Service (SaaS)-based, with a typical organization using 112 apps in their day-to-day operations. These cloud-based applications are wholly dependent on connectivity to function, and even minor slow-downs caused by congestion or packet loss on the network can kill productivity. A study we conducted found that downtime caused by poor connectivity can add up to an average of 46 minutes a week, or simply put 35 hours per year. That productivity cost can vary between $5,600 — $9,000 per minute depending on your company size and industry, according to Atlassian. The old adage rings true for downtime — time is money.

Faster Isn't Necessarily Better

This is even more true of AI-driven workloads, where businesses depend on low-latency, high-performance connectivity to generate real-time or near real-time calculations. Over the years, we have been programmed to believe that faster connectivity = better connectivity, but the reality is far more nuanced. IT decision-makers frequently chase faster connections to improve their SaaS or AI performance, but 82% severely underestimate the impact of packet loss and the general performance of their connectivity.

This is what some refer to as the "Application Performance Trap" — expecting a single, lightning-fast connection to solve all performance issues. What's more many enterprises also use the public Internet to connect to SaaS and AI applications, but the public Internet was never designed to handle today's ultra-low-latency workloads. So what happens if that connectivity pathway becomes congested, or worse, fails entirely?

When Redundancy Is a Good Thing

This is why "redundant" connectivity is essential. The main principle of redundancy in this context is that there should always be at least two paths leading to a destination — if one fails, the other can be used. This can be achieved by using a carrier-neutral Internet Exchange or IX, which facilitates direct peer-to-peer connectivity between businesses and their cloud-based workloads, essentially bypassing the public Internet. By establishing direct connectivity for SaaS and AI applications, enterprises benefit from low and predictable latency, enhanced stability and much faster data transmission that cuts jitter.

While IXs in the US were traditionally vendor-locked to a single carrier or data center, neutral IXs allow businesses to establish multiple connections with different providers — sometimes to serve a particular use-case, but often in the interests of redundancy. Our research has shown that more than 80% of IXs in the US are now data center and carrier neutral, presenting a perfect opportunity for businesses to not only back up their data, but also back up their critical connectivity this World Backup Day — avoiding any glitches on April 1.

Dr. Thomas King is CTO at DE-CIX

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

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IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

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2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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World Backup Day 2025 - Why "Redundancy" Is a Good Thing and What It Means for Your Business

Dr. Thomas King
DE-CIX

When the powers that be decided that March 31 was going to be World Backup Day in 2011, it was meant to be a joke. Why? The next day is April Fool's Day … Lose your data and the best case scenario is, well, you know the word — but at worst, it is game over. And so World Backup Day has traditionally carried a very simple yet powerful message for businesses: Backup. Your. Data.

A large part of this backing up, is "data redundancy" — the idea that storing multiple copies of data in separate locations will offer greater resilience in the event of an outage or network security breach. Yet, as workloads have moved into the cloud, and AI and SaaS applications have become dominant vehicles for productivity, the concept of "redundancy" has started to expand.

Image
World Backup Day

Contingency Cloud Connectivity

A study in 2023 found that 94% of enterprises use cloud services, which is hardly surprising, and 67% of enterprise infrastructure is now cloud-based. Given this reliance on virtualization, connectivity has become mission critical.

Businesses not only need contingency plans for their data, but contingency plans for their connectivity. And so relying on a single-lane, vendor-locked connectivity pathway is a bit like only backing your data up in one place — once that solution fails, you guessed it — it's game over.

In 2025, roughly 85% of software used by the average business is Software as a Service (SaaS)-based, with a typical organization using 112 apps in their day-to-day operations. These cloud-based applications are wholly dependent on connectivity to function, and even minor slow-downs caused by congestion or packet loss on the network can kill productivity. A study we conducted found that downtime caused by poor connectivity can add up to an average of 46 minutes a week, or simply put 35 hours per year. That productivity cost can vary between $5,600 — $9,000 per minute depending on your company size and industry, according to Atlassian. The old adage rings true for downtime — time is money.

Faster Isn't Necessarily Better

This is even more true of AI-driven workloads, where businesses depend on low-latency, high-performance connectivity to generate real-time or near real-time calculations. Over the years, we have been programmed to believe that faster connectivity = better connectivity, but the reality is far more nuanced. IT decision-makers frequently chase faster connections to improve their SaaS or AI performance, but 82% severely underestimate the impact of packet loss and the general performance of their connectivity.

This is what some refer to as the "Application Performance Trap" — expecting a single, lightning-fast connection to solve all performance issues. What's more many enterprises also use the public Internet to connect to SaaS and AI applications, but the public Internet was never designed to handle today's ultra-low-latency workloads. So what happens if that connectivity pathway becomes congested, or worse, fails entirely?

When Redundancy Is a Good Thing

This is why "redundant" connectivity is essential. The main principle of redundancy in this context is that there should always be at least two paths leading to a destination — if one fails, the other can be used. This can be achieved by using a carrier-neutral Internet Exchange or IX, which facilitates direct peer-to-peer connectivity between businesses and their cloud-based workloads, essentially bypassing the public Internet. By establishing direct connectivity for SaaS and AI applications, enterprises benefit from low and predictable latency, enhanced stability and much faster data transmission that cuts jitter.

While IXs in the US were traditionally vendor-locked to a single carrier or data center, neutral IXs allow businesses to establish multiple connections with different providers — sometimes to serve a particular use-case, but often in the interests of redundancy. Our research has shown that more than 80% of IXs in the US are now data center and carrier neutral, presenting a perfect opportunity for businesses to not only back up their data, but also back up their critical connectivity this World Backup Day — avoiding any glitches on April 1.

Dr. Thomas King is CTO at DE-CIX

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...