If you live in Canada, or you are aware of IT newsfeeds, you certainly heard about the major outage Rogers Communications faced July 8, 2022. At the early stages of this event, I was puzzled that such an outage led to service interruption for critical applications such Interac payment platform or a bunch of Canadian government services web portals.
To be honest, I can’t imagine that related decision-makers did not apply fully the diversity principle at the stage of solution design.
Among all lessons learned as a problem solver, then as a network solutions designer, one of the most significant is not to underestimate the importance to apply diversity as a key factor for redundancy and security on a technological solution design :
As stated earlier, Interac payment platform was impacted by what I will call from now the “Rogers Outage”. It’s already well known that Interac have chosen Rogers as its main service provider for its operation systems’ network connectivity. So let’s review together how this company applies the diversity principle onto its network design !
Such an organization runs its proper Internet Autonomous System to manage public IPv4 prefixes (AS399405 held under ARIN). So it’s quite easy to retrieve some useful info regarding the corresponding route objects and peering partners :
Source: https://bgp.he.net/AS399405#_asinfo
Source: https://twitter.com/mattools/status/1545440711981645826
As stated by Rogers in its response to the Request For Information from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regarding the Rogers Outage :
As mentioned earlier, we know for sure that Internet Transit connectivity setup for Interac operational systems was probably still active through an alternate ISP despite the Rogers Outage. So how can it be possible that a global Rogers outage still results in Interac payment unavailability?
A possible explanation can be that the private network interconnectivity between the different hosting locations for Interac operational systems was relying solely on Rogers Communication backbone, as illustrated in the following diagram (based on my assumptions) :
This scenario was kind of confirmed on Interac Statement on Rogers Outage :
“Each of our platforms, both Interac Debit and Interac e-Transfer, have redundant networks, including circuit diversity. These networks include 24/7 availability commitments from our suppliers, however the events of July 8th clearly revealed that these commitments could not be fulfilled. These redundant networks with circuit diversity should not have been so vulnerable to the Rogers core maintenance activity.”
Facts and assumptions - Overview
Still according to the official statement mentioned above, Interac indicated that remediation of this weakest link will be made by “adding supplier diversity to strengthen our existing network redundancy”, and by continuing “to work with our existing suppliers to strengthen commitments” :
As you can see, this post reflects my own opinions and assumptions about this topic. I’m open to external points of view to elaborate !
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]]>In a nutshell, anything related to computing technology is a component of IT.
Non-exhaustive list :
Non-exhaustive list :
IT security is the way to protect IT components from every kind of threat :
With a strong predominance of Internet-related uses, network infrastructure must be considered the backbone of computer technology.
In addition to strong reliability requirements, more and more abilities were added to network architectures the time passing by, such as content inspection/protection layers against cyberthreats.
From the decision makers to the operations technicians, passing by IT Network architects, everyone should be aware of the importance of securing IT Network.
As mentioned upper regarding a more global scope, IT Network Security in Professional Computing must be considered a long-term insurance, that means :
As you can see, this article reflects solely my opinion on this subject, and needs more external material.
So don’t hesitate to follow my LinkedIn Feed and react to that article with your own thoughs and words !
]]>Regarding my personal and professional background, that is a good example of this succession of ups and downs, I use a simple motto as my main waypoint, like **a mantra which sum-up my approach for problem solving** :
If there is no solution, there is no problem. — Unknown
I can’t remember how this came to my knowledge, so I don’t know who I can credit for that quote! Google Search hesitate between Buddhism (Dalai Lama) and Dadaism (Marcel Duchamp)…
Anyways, it has driven my decisions and choices at least thorough the past 15 years, with quite a good success :
From my point of view, using this mantra as a decisional leverage, combinated with a solid professional expertise, is a good way to find relevant (sometimes out-of-bounds) solutions to :
As it worked for me, I have no doubt that some of you will find out that this “mantra” makes sense ! And if it can help you to complete your daily challenges as from now, I will be more than pleased :)
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