What CIOs Get Wrong About Global Infrastructure Resilience (And How To Fix It)

Article originally published on Forbes.com. Image courtesy of Getty.

Over the last two decades, I’ve seen firsthand how CIOs approach infrastructure strategy. While availability is still the top KPI in most boardroom discussions, many IT leaders mistakenly believe redundancy equals resilience. That assumption is not only outdated; it’s increasingly dangerous.

In today’s world, where threats range from geopolitical shutdowns to latency-sensitive workloads and unpredictable cloud outages, resilience requires more than backup servers and multi-region cloud deployments. It calls for architectural intention, operational readiness and network agility.

Mistake 1: Thinking Uptime Means Resilience

A system can be technically "up" but fail its users. Jitter, latency and poor routing can derail application performance even when there's no formal outage. If your team only tracks availability, not experience, you may be missing systemic blind spots. Real resilience measures how consistently your users can interact with your applications at expected levels of performance.

Mistake 2: Over-Reliance On Hyperscalers

Public cloud platforms offer speed and reach, but they also create dependence. In many cases, they lack sufficient visibility, route control or localized compliance flexibility. While convenient, relying solely on hyperscalers leaves your team at the mercy of someone else's SLAs, geopolitical exposure and network architecture. Organizations must consider how they would respond if a hyperscaler’s region becomes inaccessible or degrades.

Mistake 3: Ignoring Network Transport

Applications rely on the path between locations just as much as the infrastructure at each endpoint. When enterprises overlook routing optimization, anycast implementation and transit diversity, they create a single point of failure beneath the surface. Poor transit selection or inadequate BGP routing policies can create performance bottlenecks and availability risks that DR plans alone won't fix.

Mistake 4: One-Size-Fits-All Disaster Recovery

Different workloads require different resilience strategies. For example, AI inference workloads benefit from edge-based redundancy, while SaaS tools may tolerate asynchronous recovery. Uniform DR planning can lead to unnecessary costs or critical exposure. Every application, especially those operating globally, should have a tailored continuity profile.

Mistake 5: Underestimating Jurisdictional Risk

Infrastructure lives in the real world. From data localization laws to state-controlled blackouts, regional factors can suddenly impact entire deployments. I've seen service interruptions caused not by failure, but by government-imposed restrictions or data sovereignty requirements. Designing for jurisdictional resilience means anticipating both technical and legal disruption.

What Resilience Really Looks Like

Modern resilience requires a layered, adaptive model. To get started, consider the following first steps:

• Deploy in geographically diverse edge and core regions to avoid over-concentration.

• Use real-time telemetry to guide routing and workload placement dynamically.

• Ensure transport-layer resilience with smart BGP policies and multi-provider strategies.

• Embrace autonomous recovery capabilities at the edge, where connectivity may be limited.

• Make failover testing a routine process that includes both infrastructure and application-level behavior.

Furthermore, resilient organizations proactively simulate different failure scenarios. They test their assumptions. They incorporate resilience into procurement and design, not just operations. They ask, “What happens if this entire region is lost for 72 hours?” or, “What if an upstream transit provider disappears unexpectedly?”

Resilience is more than redundancy. It’s about foresight, flexibility and ongoing design maturity. CIOs who evolve beyond uptime metrics and build for disruption will set the pace in an increasingly volatile digital world. The most forward-looking teams see resilience as more than an insurance policy.

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