Six Ways to Get a More Resilient Network in 2025

By David Sloan, Solutions Architect

Is your business ready for 2025? Prevent downtime and protect your bottom line with our tips for improving network resilience.

From the applications running critical workloads in the cloud to remote users dispersed across different global regions, the world of 2025 needs to be completely interconnected. And with businesses in all industries relying on these interconnections to deliver promises to customers, hit deadlines, and attain revenue, network resilience has never been more crucial.

By 2025, the need for robust, resilient networks will only intensify as businesses continue their rapid digital transformations. In the midst of global inflation and uncertainty, 91% of global tech decision-makers have planned for budget increases in 2025.

And with recent research suggesting downtime costs organizations up to $9,000 a minute, increasingly cloud-native businesses simply can’t afford to leave their network operations down to chance. From preventing downtime and protecting sensitive data to maintaining business continuity, the stakes are too high.

Keep your network on and your operations running in 2025 with these six ways to improve your network resilience.

1. Virtualize your connectivity with Network as a Service

One of the most efficient ways to build resilience into your network from end to end is by adopting Network as a Service (NaaS) for your underlay. Unlike unreliable public internet or cumbersome telco connections, using NaaS for your connectivity provides a flexible private fabric between all of your network points.

With NaaS, you’re no longer tethered to rigid contracts, long provisioning times, or shared bandwidth. Instead, you can dynamically scale and adapt your network resources based on real-time needs, as well as leverage data-center-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud use cases with ease.

NaaS providers offer redundancy and failover options by design, ensuring you don’t have to worry about a single point of failure. The flexibility of NaaS is also ideal for handling the increased complexity that comes with hybrid cloud and multicloud environments because NaaS networks operate in the same on-demand way that cloud service providers subscribe to, as well as being vendor agnostic with data center providers.

Look for a provider with an expansive global footprint—the bigger, the better—as well as a solutions suite that allows you to extend this virtualization to and between your clouds, edge, data centers, and security layer.

By migrating your network services to a NaaS provider, you also benefit from their expertise as they offer 24/7 monitoring and real-time troubleshooting.

Example use case

Imagine a global logistics company operating out of multiple regions. With NaaS, they can ensure seamless network performance, no matter the geographic location, without building out their own expensive infrastructure in each place – they can just jump on the NaaS provider’s global backbone to communicate between their global ports and warehouses in real time.

With 930+ enabled data centers worldwide, Megaport is the market leader in NaaS. Get a free demo to learn more.

2. Interconnect your data centers

Even if you don’t have a globalized workforce or interregional data transfer requirements, regional outages or natural disasters could render your business-critical information inaccessible if you rely on a single data center.

By having geographically distributed access points to your business data, you can enjoy uninterrupted service if a data center in one region goes down. This is why we always recommend accessing your cloud and managed service providers via a resilient network with multiple failover strategies, which is embedded in NaaS provider solutions.

Take your network resilience a step further by interconnecting your data centers and enabling automated failover in the event one center goes offline. This way, your critical services remain operational without interruption. By allowing your different on-ramps to communicate directly with each other through Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) and Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE), you’ll also reduce network hops, latency, and jitter for more stable operations.

As the global business environment becomes more volatile and fast-paced, interconnecting data centers ensures that your business stays immune to localized disruptions.

Example use case

A financial institution running critical operations can’t afford downtime. By interconnecting data centers, they can failover operations seamlessly in milliseconds between locations if one center experiences an issue, with little impact on operations.

Link endpoints across cities, countries, and continents with Megaport Data Center Interconnect.

3. Virtualize your network edge

If your business is using SD-WAN, you’re already a step ahead with your network resilience. SD-WAN enables dynamic path selection, which means traffic can be rerouted across multiple paths based on real-time network conditions. This capability ensures that if one link is congested or fails, your traffic will automatically switch to the best available option.

But it’s just as important to fortify your SD-WAN connections with secure features that will protect the uptime of your branch-to-cloud connectivity.

Adopting a SASE architecture secures your SD-WAN with identity-based secure web gateways, Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), context-based zero-trust access, and other edge tools that protect the resilience of your cloud network right to the branch.

Example use case

An online gaming provider deploys Firewall as a Service across its SD-WAN architecture to allow for rapid response to security threats. The FWaaS intelligently contains or reroutes potentially malicious traffic before it impacts the broader gaming network, protecting the provider from widespread disruptions that could lead to downtime, poor user experience, and customer churn.

Get exclusive insights on how you can start using FWaaS to protect your network.

4. Automate network monitoring and management

Automation tools do more than just help you monitor and manage your network in real time; they can be an effective way to quickly detect and respond to potential issues before they escalate to network downtime.

Types of automation tools you can look to implement across your network include:

• APIs or Terraform: Today, 90% of developers are utilizing APIs or Terraform, with this number set to increase through 2025. By allowing you to interconnect diverse data sources across your business, provisioning APIs or Terraform can make your network more interoperable and resilient, opening more communication paths and minimizing your attack surface.
• Cloud automation: Major cloud providers now offer a massive variety of AI tools to support your automation journey. Build resilience-boosting features into your cloud architecture including predictive maintenance, real-time analytics, and anomaly detection.
• AI connectivity: AI isn’t magic. The performance of your AI applications—and the resilience of your network—hinges on the infrastructure and connections that bind it. Unlock the full benefits of automation by incorporating automation into your infrastructure with GPUaaS providers, third-party AI models, and storage and compute.

Example use case

An online retailer is preparing for its annual Black Friday sale, expecting a massive influx of traffic on its website. The network team uses a combination of APIs or Terraform and generative AI across the retailer’s clouds and infrastructure to detect latency spikes and intelligently reroute traffic without the need for human intervention. As a result, the retailer can provide customers with a smooth user experience and zero downtime during peak traffic periods.

Supercharge your AI innovation with Megaport AI Exchange.

5. Test your failover strategies regularly

Having a disaster recovery plan is great, but when was the last time you tested it?

The complexity of modern networks increases the possibility of deployment errors – and the worst time to find these errors is during a disaster. As your network grows increasingly virtual and you begin to incorporate more automation, it’s critical to keep testing your failover strategies to make sure they will work when you need them to.

By conducting a business impact analysis, you can take stock of every piece of hardware or data and identify high-risk threats, focusing on business-critical protections first.

Example use case

A government agency regularly conducts simulated network outages to monitor failover strategies and ensure critical services stay on. By identifying and fixing faults in a controlled environment, the agency can respond to real outages with confidence, keeping critical services running and restoring all other services quickly.

6. Encourage a security-first mindset

Security plays a critical role in the resilience of your network. Hardware failures are just one cause of downtime – a cyberattack will not only paralyze your network, it will also threaten the confidentiality of your sensitive data.

When you encourage your network and IT teams to adopt a security-first mindset, you shift the perspective from reactive to proactive, preventing problems before they appear. Conduct a business impact analysis (same as point five) to prioritize and implement preventative measures, and bring your business along for the journey by sharing regular communications and training opportunities.

Example use case

An employee in a legal firm’s accounts team receives an email from their manager that doesn’t look quite right. After carefully scanning the it, they discover there is a typo in the sender email and report it immediately.

Thanks to the regular training and proactive communication from their IT team, the employee prevented a phishing email from infecting the firm’s entire corporate network with malware that would have compromised their highly sensitive data.

Discover how to build a cybersecurity culture across your organization.

Conclusion

In 2025, the demands on your network will be more complex than ever. A resilient network not only reduces downtime but also protects your business from the growing risks associated with outages, ensuring business continuity, customer satisfaction, and long-term success.

By adopting these six strategies, you can significantly improve your network’s resilience.

Build a network ready for everything 2025 throws your way. Chat to our friendly team to learn how Megaport can help.