Embrace the Internet

Embrace the Internet as your new corporate network

When we talk about the Internet, we're referring to the infrastructure outside the corporate network, specifically the public Internet and its supporting physical components—fiber cables, routers, switches, and other elements. This foundational layer plays a crucial role in how data flows between networks, and its security and reliability.

The public Internet is often seen as a vast, interconnected web of networks, but the exact path that data takes across this infrastructure is largely unknown and unpredictable. When you send information across the Internet, it can pass through dozens of networks, routers, and transit providers. These routes are determined dynamically, influenced by factors like traffic congestion, outages, and the policies of intermediary networks.

Organisations may find their data traveling through regions or networks with poor security, facing potential exposure to cyberattacks or data interception. The unknown path also complicates troubleshooting and performance optimisation, as pinpointing the cause of latency or packet loss becomes difficult.

How NL-ix Enhances the Public Internet Underlay

All though NL-ix is part of the public Internet infrastructure, it enables enterprises to take better advantage of the public Internet underlay. At NL-ix, we manage the critical hardware of the Internet backbone, including routers, switches, and fiber-optic cables. Instead of routing traffic through multiple transit providers, this infrastructure enables direct traffic routing between connected networks (organisations), which optimises traffic paths, reduces congestion, and lowers latency.

In short this means that organisations connected to NL-ix bypass insecure parts of the public Internet underlay: traffic is exchanged within the safe, controlled, and monitored NL-ix network, isolated from general public traffic, reducing the risk of interception or unauthorised access. Connnected networks can ensure that sensitive traffic stays within trusted routes, even while utilising the global Internet infrastructure.

Visibility into traffic routes with NL-ix

NL-ix doesn't just talk about secure traffic routes; it provides clear visibility into them. Organisations exchanging traffic via NL-ix, gain detailed information about where their traffic is going, which routes are being used, and how data flows. The ICON dashboard offers insights into what portion of traffic - typically around 90-95%— stays within the secure NL-ix network and what traffic is sent to the public Internet when the destination network isn’t connected to NL-ix.

We recognise that the Internet underlay is often overlooked and nearly forgotten in network discussions, but we believe that connecting to NL-ix provides significant advantages. For organisations subject to EU regulatory frameworks such as NIS2, DORA and CER, connecting to the NL-ix infrastructure means a significant improvement of the physical infrastructure up and beyond the corporate network versus transit. After all:  The physical infrastructure, or the underlay, remains the critical foundation that determines network performance, reliability, and security and keeps everything running smoothly.