If your organisation was affected in some way by the internet connectivity disruption in the West Coast, then this article is for you. We will be looking at possible mitigative controls that if they were in place, would have reduced the effect of the outage.

1. Satellite ISPs: If you've heard of Elon Musk, you must have heard about many of his adventurous ideas about space science, but one that isn’t crazy is Starlink, which basically allows you to access the internet via satellite communication using optical ground communication (OGS) networks. An organisation serious about service continuity can have this as a fallback option in cases of fibre optic cable disruption.

2. Caching (and CDNs): For the purpose of explaining this to a vast audience, I will use Microsoft Azure and AWS as illustrative examples, but this can be setup completely independent of Azure/AWS and is a broad topic in itself occurring in various layers in data communication. When we host apps/services with Microsoft/AWS, it usually resides in their data centers overseas, where they have physical presence. Many people use east-us, east-us2, etc. This is accessible via end-to-end internet connectivity. However, there is a little known service by these service providers. Microsoft calls its own “POP locations”, AWs calls its "Edge locations", and they both have in Lagos!!! What this means is that even if there is an issue with the submarine cable in the West Coast (like Ivory Coast, Senegal, etc.) it shouldn't immediately impact a well-architected solution in these platforms. The service responsible for this configuration in AWS and Azure is Cloudfront and Front door respectively.

3. VPN: When people think about VPNs, they think about accessing an internal network securely over the internet. But it does not have to be through the internet. In a very simple scenario, the headquarters of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) can configure the VPN Server without the need to go through the internet. This will enable branches to connect securely without the need for the internet. This is not theoretical, as I have seen it in use previously but under different scenarios. An IT colleague of mine connected to his private home network from his custom (and private) office network via VPN without internet connection. This can reduce the number of disruptions during a regional internet outage.

As a country, you should know why your citizens visit the internet, then deliver native solutions independent of the broader internet to meet their needs. For example, you shouldn't rely on Facebook servers hosted somewhere in the United States before your citizens can use social networks. There are many alternatives for this that do not rely on the submarine cables to Africa, some are not even dependent on the World Wide Web and use different protocols. If a local needs to transfer money to a local bank in your country, there is no reason why distorting a cable in the Atlantic ocean should stop him from doing that too.

I have at least two more mitigative solutions that will help in this scenerio, but their implementation is controversial and I want to limit to the three I considered best. Do you have any alternative that would have prevented this from happening? Please share!!