Inside the mind and heart of Venkatesh Sridhar

I was reading Balu’s blog which I was able to access as he was kind enough to fill out his details when he commented on my post about the Communist Party of India. I came across an interesting post titled, ‘India’s security compromised?‘, it was an intriguing title and off I went to read it. I went through it and started typing out a comment and it just grew so long that I felt it had to be spawned into a post.

In the post, Balu talks about how a terrorist can be lured into thinking that attacking the fibers that connect India to the world will be able to bring India to an abrupt and devastating halt. There were fears expresses that the high seas cannot be monitored, there are neighbors who cannot be trusted and that not having cables through land can be a major source of security lapse.

Then, I come across this post on ZDNet Blogs, titled ‘Pakistan removed from the Internet‘. I was like whoa, what the hell happened there. I thought the ICANN was banning Pakistan and not allowing it to use the Internet or something on those lines. But, here is what actually happened:

4:30 PM Eastern (US).

The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan’s traffic, PCCW, has found it necessary to shut Pakistan off from the Internet while they filter out the malicious routes that a Pakistani ISP, PieNet, announced earlier today. Evidently PieNet took this step to enforce a decree from the Pakistani government that ISP’s must block access to YouTube because it was a source of blasphemous content.

Confused and want to learn more about and understand it go here. The thing is that PCCW which is a Hong Kong based ISP for ISPs screwed up because PieNet sent a bad routing information which made all goers to YouTube reach a Pakistan based website which the Government of Pakistan felt was more appropriate content.
So, I was thinking can this be alarmist, I mean the Internet can be screwed by one unscrupulous ISP acting on Government orders. It is highly dangerous not only for India but for all countries.

I felt Balu’s post was an alarmist, but it does make me wonder if the UN should classify any form of Information Technology attack as an act of war. Then I immediately realized that would give enough fodder for any powerful nation to go to war against any nation. Imagine this, I want to go to war against any other nation and I get some ship to anchor and break the cables and then say that it’s an act of war and off I go to war against it.

Thank God in 2008, a certain nation goes to elections and let’s hope a more smarter and statesman like person gets elected as their leader.

But, I digress. Coming back to my main point, what is it that India Inc. and India’s Government is doing to maintain its IT assets- stuff like its IT cables, the Internet backbone, etc. India is highly dependent on IT for its economic growth. The Government will be more interested in protecting its Military IT assets and I am sure that it has a very safe mechanism for the same. Secretive of course.

I came across a blog run by a company called Renesys. Renesys is a company that provides Internet Intelligence. In a blog titled Cable Breaks: Lessons Learned they write:

In the past 14 months, the world has seen two catastrophic failures of its global telecommunications systems: the Taiwan quakes, which snapped 7 of 9 important cables in Asia in December 2006, and a series of mishaps in the Mediterranean and the Gulf, damaging several others. In a world increasingly dependent on global trade and communications, what lessons can we learn from all of this and what measures should we take?

I’ll discuss these questions in what follows, but let me warn you in advance. There is nothing earth-shattering here. In fact, I can save you time and sum up the entire discussion with three bullet points:

• You get what you pay for.
• Entropy happens.
• Geography matters.

We’ve seen a lot of comments and discussion that fail to take into account one or more of these basics truths. Let’s look at each point in detail.

You get what you pay for.

The segment of humanity that relies on the Internet can be roughly broken into two camps: Internet Consumers and Internet Providers. Internet Consumers are individuals, governments or businesses who use the Internet for their own purposes. Internet Providers are in the business of providing Internet access to Internet Consumers. While it is possible to be in both camps, most groups are largely in one or the other. Each has different lessons to learn.

To protect themselves, Internet Consumers need to do at most three things.

1. Determine the importance of their connectivity.
2. Make the business case for change, if it is warranted.
3. Become an informed consumer and buy appropriately.

Can your business survive a complete loss of connectivity or severely degraded connectivity for a day, a week, or a month? If your answer is “no” for anything less than a month, you need to seriously consider your disaster plans. Undersea cables can easily take a month to repair. And in times of distress, there may be many more organizations (with deeper pockets) in line ahead of you. You need more than multiple providers or backup lines. You need to concern yourself with their physical independence. In other words, having 3 or 10 providers is of no help if they all use the same submarine cable. Don’t think of the expense of multiple providers as insurance against an unlikely event, such as your house catching on fire. Your house almost certainly is not going to burn to the ground. However, the Internet cables your business runs on are going to fail; it is only a matter of when and to what degree. Figure out what reliable, fault-tolerant connectivity is worth to you and then buy what makes sense. No one else can do this for you.

To sell to informed Internet Consumers and stay competitive, Internet Providers need to do at least three things.

1. Plan for disasters and have a response plan in place.
2. Build redundancy.
3. Sell your great network to your customers.

When planning for disasters, consider your response to individual cable breaks. If you plan to just “wait it out”, consider what losing all your customers in a region will mean to your bottom line. They won’t be waiting for the repair ships to arrive. As we saw with the latest round of cable cuts, reaction time is everything in gaining new business. Your former loyal customers will be gone in a heartbeat if you can’t deliver in an emergency. Of course, in order to have any contingency plan at all, you need some redundancy in your network, which then gives you a great sales and marketing tool, especially after events like these. Remind your potential customers of the dangers of a focus on price alone. Even if they don’t buy from you today, they will still be around when the next cable breaks. Of course, to be effective and stay one step ahead of your competitors, you need up-to-the-minute Internet Intelligence which is where Renesys comes in. It is of no surprise to us to see our customers doing well both during and after such outages.

Entropy happens.

While I’ll admit that multiple cable breaks in a week does seem somewhat unlikely, I learned long ago to never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or simply chance. Given the laws of nature and the fact that there are over 6 billion of us bumbling along, I can’t say it is all that surprising either. Individual cable outages occur all the time and seldom get much attention - the sea floor is not the most hospitable environment for fiber optics. The Economist reports that there were over 50 repair operations in the Atlantic last year alone. Wired claims an average of one cable cut every three days. What these outages teach us is that chance events do not have to be uniformly distributed by geography or by time. And the only reason we even noticed these is because of the extreme lack of redundancy in the region.

Geography matters.

As does weather, economics, politics and other annoyances of a non-virtual world. You can see these forces in action on cable maps. If you look at the Middle East in particular, where would you lay the cables?

• West? That takes you through the Sahara.
• South? It’s a long way around the horn of Africa.
• East? That’s the really long way to reach your business partners in Europe.
• North? Better, but avoid the war zones.

The point is simply that your options are going to be influenced by where you live.

I don’t mean to imply that any of the problems we’ve seen are unsolvable. If Internet Consumers demand cheap access above all else, they will get it and, as a consequence, it will be unreliable. If they demand reliable access above all else and are willing to pay for it, the Internet Providers will be more than happy to accommodate them. The ones who don’t won’t be around for long. And in the overall scheme of things, we are not talking about a lot of money. A mere $125M USD gets you a brand new cable from Egypt to France, but only about one third of a plane. Internet consumers, which include governments, need to decide which is more useful.

That pretty much summarizes what I wanted to say. The Government of India should invest more and more into ensuring that we have so much redundancy built in that we cannot go down completely. This has to be on an ongoing basis and needs to be reviewed every 2 years as the demand for bandwidth keeps increasing. India Inc. has to put pressure on the Government of India to take this move.

But, what is India Inc. doing? We all know that all major ISPs in the world have redundancy built into their network. Normally known as the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific routes. Which means that you have one cable going to the west and one to the east of India connecting India to the world. Now, major IT companies have redundancy builtin by taking up bandwidth from different providers, for eg: VSNL and Reliance so as to ensure that they are not caught out if one backbone providers cable gets snapped like the recent outages.

But, in case of a co-ordinated attack either by our enemies or terrorists or a deluge of data across both the sides then what will we do. India Inc. and Government of India should think of a remedy, I am not qualified enough to provide a solution at this point in time but I am trying to get their eyeballs and heads engaged in protecting India’s assets.