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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

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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.

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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

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Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Despite the frustrations, every engineer we spoke with ultimately affirmed the value and power of OpenTelemetry. The "sucks" moments are often the flip side of its greatest strengths ... Part 2 of this blog covers the powerful advantages and breakthroughs — the "OTel Rocks" moments ...

OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from Information Services Group ...

The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

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Real privacy protection thanks to technology and processes is often portrayed as too hard and too costly to implement. So the most common strategy is to do as little as possible just to conform to formal requirements of current and incoming regulations. This is a missed opportunity ...

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