When a cluster of subsea cables in the Red Sea were damaged in early 2024, the disruption to internet traffic across Asia, Europe and Africa was swift and profound.

For the enterprises that depend on seamless cross-border connectivity, the incident was a reminder that the physical underpinnings of the global network remain vulnerable to forces far beyond the control of any single operator. 

It also underscored a question that has moved from the fringes of infrastructure strategy to the centre of boardroom conversations: how do you build a network that holds when the world around it shifts?

Sharat Sinha, CEO of Airtel Business, the enterprise and wholesale arm of India's Bharti Airtel, has a clear view on what that demands. 

Speaking to Data Centre Magazine, he sets out how the company is responding to a landscape defined not just by accelerating data growth, but by geopolitical instability, rising operational costs and the emergence of AI as a driver of infrastructure investment.

The network demands of a digital-first era

The challenges confronting telecom operators today are as structural as they are technological. 

Sharat explains how the rollout of 5G and the proliferation of IoT devices are placing pressure on network capacity at a rate that demands not just investment, but a rethinking of how infrastructure is planned and managed. 

At the same time, operators are navigating rising energy costs and the complexity of maintaining profitability while funding the next generation of connectivity, he notes.

Sharat frames the moment in terms that go beyond the familiar discourse around speed and bandwidth. 

“The need today is not just for connectivity, but for an intelligent and secure network that supports mission-critical applications across geographies,” he says. 

“At Airtel Business, we address these challenges by leveraging our global network infrastructure, advanced SD-WAN, cloud-native platforms and integrated advanced security measures, to deliver reliable, high-speed connectivity and intelligent automation at scale. 

“Our commitment to interoperability ensures that enterprises can integrate diverse devices and platforms seamlessly, while our security-first approach incorporates industry-leading safeguards across all layers of the network empowering enterprises worldwide to innovate and thrive in the digital economy.”

Rerouting around geopolitical risk in real time

The 2024 Red Sea disruptions brought the vulnerability of concentrated subsea cable routes into sharp focus. Repeated incidents in a single corridor demonstrated that traffic diversity is not a luxury but a requirement for any enterprise seeking to guarantee operational continuity. For Airtel Business, the events have reinforced an approach to network architecture that it had already been developing with enterprise customers.

Sharat describes a framework built on three pillars. The first is network redundancy and geographic diversity. “By leveraging our extensive global infrastructure and partnerships, we enable enterprises to route critical data and applications across multiple, geographically dispersed pathways – minimising reliance on any single subsea cable or transit corridor,” he explains. “This approach ensures that, even when key routes like the Suez are compromised, our customers’ operations remain uninterrupted.”

The second is managed security and connectivity, delivered through next-generation SD-WAN and zero-trust architectures that allow dynamic, automated rerouting and maintain high-performance connectivity regardless of external disruptions. 

The third is AI-driven threat intelligence, which provides continuous monitoring and response capability during periods of instability. “This holistic approach empowers our customers to maintain operations, safeguard data and adapt quickly, irrespective of how the global network landscape evolves,” Sharat says.

Hybrid architecture as a strategic risk tool

Hybrid network architecture has become the framework of choice for enterprises seeking to balance performance, cost and resilience. 

The model draws together subsea cables, long-haul terrestrial fibre and technologies such as Optical Ground Wire networks to create multiple pathways for critical traffic. 

The principle is straightforward: if one path is compromised, traffic moves elsewhere without service interruption.

Sharat emphasises the inherent value here. For latency-sensitive applications – high-frequency trading and real-time OTT streaming, for example – even minor jitter or delay is unacceptable. A well-designed hybrid network addresses that by distributing workloads across multiple geographies and cloud providers, reducing dependence on any single infrastructure or location. 

“The key advantage is diversity across geography, medium, and route,” he says. “This is especially critical in regions like the Red Sea and Suez corridor, where repeated disruptions have underscored the dangers of relying on a single high-traffic route.”

But Sharat is also clear that diversity alone is not enough. “Resilience is not just about adding more routes, it is also about designing an intelligent architecture,” Sharat explains. 

Hybrid networks, in his view, need to be engineered to predict potential failure points, to distinguish between mission-critical and background traffic, and to recover at speed. Advanced orchestration and AI-driven security operations are, he argues, what convert physical diversity into genuine network intelligence.

Hybrid networking means more than adding fibre

One of the persistent misconceptions in infrastructure discussions is that resilience is primarily a question of volume – that more fibre routes automatically translate to greater uptime. 

Sharat challenges that concept and the problem, he argues, is that additional routes which pass through the same geographic or regulatory chokepoints do not actually reduce concentration risk. The measure of a hybrid network is not the number of paths it contains but how intelligently it manages them.

“At Airtel Business, we therefore ensure a strategic and intelligent approach to hybrid networking that goes well beyond simply adding more fibre routes,” Sharat says. 

“We integrate multiple network technologies – such as fibre, wireless, satellite, and cloud-based gateways – into a unified, resilient architecture that is both agile and secure.” 

The company’s hybrid solutions dynamically manage traffic, automatically rerouting around outages while optimising performance and reducing costs. 

“By prioritising intelligent orchestration, global reach, and flexible bandwidth, we ensure that enterprises can maintain business continuity and adapt quickly to geopolitical or infrastructural disruptions, rather than relying solely on physical redundancy of fibre routes,” he adds.

Moving beyond subsea cable dependence

The vulnerabilities exposed by the Red Sea incidents have accelerated a conversation in the industry about the limits of subsea infrastructure as the primary vehicle for global connectivity.

For Airtel Business, diversification is not a reactive measure but a deliberate part of its infrastructure strategy.

The company is investing in what Sharat describes as a “global mesh of fibre”, wireless and cloud-based connectivity, supported by orchestration platforms that dynamically route traffic across diverse physical and virtual routes. 

The expansion of edge and cloud interconnect capabilities is central to that effort, enabling enterprises to maintain performance and resilience regardless of disruptions at the subsea layer. 

“This multi-technology, globally distributed strategy empowers our customers with uninterrupted connectivity and true business continuity,” explains Sharat.

Data centres built for AI-era demands

No discussion of enterprise connectivity infrastructure in 2026 is complete without addressing the data centre. 

India’s data consumption is growing at 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), driven by AI workloads, cloud adoption and IoT proliferation. That trajectory is compressing timelines for infrastructure investment and raising the bar for what a data centre must deliver. 

Uptime is no longer sufficient. The requirement is now for facilities that are scalable, sustainable and designed from the outset to support AI.

Airtel’s data centre business operates through Nxtra by Airtel, which runs 14 large and 120 edge data centres across more than 65 cities in India. The network is integrated with Airtel’s global subsea and terrestrial infrastructure, delivering low-latency connectivity and multi-path redundancy.

Facilities are interconnected through multiple long-haul and metro fibre routes, enabling real-time data replication and rapid disaster recovery.

The expansion plan is comprehensive. Sharat confirms that Nxtra is targeting a doubling of total capacity to 400 MW within two years, including new hyperscale facilities in all major metros. The company is also extending its regional footprint, with edge data centres now operating in cities including Agartala, Patna, Guwahati, Sambalpur, Gangaganj and Vijayawada. 

The rationale is to bring digital infrastructure within reach of users in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities, reducing latency and bandwidth costs, in particular for live and high-definition streaming.

Nxtra has also become the first data centre in India to use AI to manage facility operations, applying it to predictive maintenance, energy efficiency, automation and capital expenditure optimisation. 

The approach reflects a broader shift in how data centres are being conceived – not as passive infrastructure but as active components of an intelligent network.

The future belongs to self-healing networks

Looking further ahead, Sharat sees a period of fundamental change in the way enterprises conceive of network architecture. The trajectory he describes is one of convergence: software-defined infrastructure, AI-driven automation and cloud-native platforms coming together in systems that can manage themselves in real time.

It is a shift driven not just by technological possibility but by the operating environment that enterprises now inhabit – one in which disruptions, whether geopolitical, physical or cyber in origin, are a constant rather than an exception. 

The question for network architects is no longer whether disruption will occur, but how quickly and automatically the network can respond when it does.

“The future belongs to agile, self-healing, and secure networks that turn complexity into competitive advantage in a world where volatility is constant,” Sharat says.