Network Provider Redundancy

This question asks if your data centers have internet connections from multiple different providers entering through separate physical paths. It's like having both cable and fiber internet at your office from different companies - if one fails, you still have connectivity. This ensures a single cable cut or provider outage won't take your service offline.

Network redundancy directly impacts your uptime guarantees and SLA commitments. A single network entrance creates a critical failure point that could cause extended outages, violating customer SLAs, triggering penalties, and damaging your reputation. Enterprise customers expect this redundancy as table stakes - without it, you'll lose deals to competitors who can guarantee higher availability.

Many assume having multiple internet connections means true redundancy, but if they all enter through the same physical conduit or rely on the same upstream provider, a single incident can still cause total failure. Another mistake is not regularly testing failover procedures to ensure redundancy actually works when needed.