Cables, Clouds, and Power: How the Invisible Routes of the Internet Could Determine Your Company's Future

What is truly at stake is not connectivity alone—it is power, dependency, and an organization's freedom to operate.

The internet became mainstream under the promise that everything happens "in the cloud." For virtually every organization today, however, that metaphor is no longer sufficient. The cloud is far from intangible. It consists of approximately 1.48 million kilometers of submarine fiber-optic cables, more than 570 active cable systems, and a physical infrastructure that carries 99% of international internet traffic—an infrastructure with owners, geographic boundaries, and very real vulnerabilities.

For decades, this network was built and operated by telecommunications consortia through shared investments and relatively diversified ownership. In less than a decade, however, the landscape shifted dramatically. The companies generating most of the world's internet traffic also became the primary builders and owners of the infrastructure that carries it. Before 2012, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon accounted for less than 10% of global submarine cable capacity. By 2024, multiple industry analyses estimate that these hyperscalers controlled between 66% and 71% of that capacity. Rather than simply using the internet, they now finance, design, and operate a substantial portion of its backbone.

The concentration extends beyond physical infrastructure into the cloud layer. According to multiple industry analyses, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud collectively account for between 62% and 66% of the global cloud infrastructure market, while hyperscalers are projected to invest more than $600 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 to further expand data centers and cloud platforms. To put that figure into perspective, it is roughly equivalent to the annual GDP of countries such as Argentina or Saudi Arabia.

From an efficiency standpoint, the logic is compelling: whoever controls the submarine cable, the data center, the cloud region, the content delivery layer, and the artificial intelligence stack can provide highly integrated, powerful digital services. Viewed through the lens of enterprise risk, however, the equation changes. The same concentration that enables unprecedented scale can also leave thousands of organizations dependent on the decisions, jurisdictions, and strategic priorities of only a handful of providers.

The vulnerability of this model is no longer theoretical—it has already been demonstrated in real-world events. In February 2024, the cargo vessel Rubymar was struck in the Red Sea, and as it drifted, it damaged four critical submarine cables: AAE-1, SEACOM, TGN-EA, and EIG. The incident disrupted approximately 25% of the data traffic between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East in a region where just 16 submarine cables carry nearly 17% of global internet traffic and 90% of communications between Europe and Asia through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. A single vessel, caught in the midst of a regional conflict, was enough to expose the world's dependence on narrow geographic chokepoints that had remained largely invisible to most businesses.

Only a few months later, in November 2024, two submarine cables in the Baltic Sea were severed within hours of each other. European governments, together with NATO, treated the incidents as potential hybrid attacks. Lithuania lost approximately 20% of its international internet capacity as a result of a single cable cut, while multiple similar incidents were reported across the region between 2023 and 2024. Earlier that same year, in March 2024, several countries across West and Southern Africa experienced widespread connectivity disruptions after damage to Atlantic submarine cables, leaving more than ten nations with severely degraded—or, in some cases, virtually collapsed—internet access.

Economic studies of these incidents indicate that submarine cable disruptions can cost millions of dollars per hour, hundreds of millions per day, and escalate into billions of dollars if outages persist for weeks. A macroeconomic analysis published in 2026 found that major connectivity disruptions translate, over the medium term, into significant cumulative declines in GDP per capita growth across affected economies. When connectivity is compromised, the consequences extend far beyond slower data transmission—financial transactions, supply chains, critical services, and enterprise coordination capabilities all slow down as well.

All of this is unfolding on a geopolitical landscape that is no longer neutral. Strategic competition between the United States and China has transformed digital infrastructure into a battleground for regulatory influence, technological leadership, and national security. The replacement of vendors in projects such as the SEA-ME-WE 6 submarine cable, the nationalization of key manufacturers such as Alcatel Submarine Networks in France, and restrictions on semiconductor, cloud, and artificial intelligence technologies are all manifestations of the same broader trend: the partial decoupling of global digital supply chains and the race to control critical infrastructure. For businesses, geopolitical risk extends well beyond tariffs and sanctions—it can directly affect the platforms that host their data, business processes, and mission-critical applications.

Latin America illustrates this tension between growth and dependency particularly well. According to LACNIC, by the end of 2023, nearly all of the region's international bandwidth continued to be routed through the United States and Canada, despite total international capacity growing to 157 Tbps and maintaining a strong annual expansion rate. Historically, even traffic exchanged between neighboring countries has often been routed through hubs such as Miami or New York, an architecture that has increased latency, operational costs, and exposure to data sovereignty concerns. Projects such as AMX-3/Tikal, MANTA, and new submarine cable initiatives in Mexico seek to diversify this connectivity landscape. Nevertheless, the underlying pattern remains largely unchanged: Latin America's digital connectivity has evolved on a foundation of structural dependence on North American network hubs.

In this context, digital sovereignty takes on a tangible business dimension. It is not about building a parallel internet or reversing decades of technological integration. Rather, it is about recognizing that dependency is real and asking how much strategic autonomy an organization wants to preserve. Multiple analyses of European and global enterprises reach the same conclusion: meaningful digital sovereignty does not require abandoning hyperscale cloud providers. Instead, it means ensuring freedom of choice, maintaining appropriate control over critical data, and preserving the ability to migrate or diversify infrastructure when risk demands it. Strategic autonomy is not accidental—it must be deliberately designed.

Designing that freedom of action requires three fundamental shifts in leadership perspective.

The first is recognizing that connectivity is a strategic business risk, not merely a technology service. Just as organizations assess exposure to currency fluctuations, regulatory changes, key suppliers, or reputational crises, they must also incorporate digital infrastructure—including submarine cables, cloud environments, geographic regions, network routes, and content delivery layers—into their enterprise risk management framework. This means asking questions that too few organizations consider: How much of our business depends on a single cloud region? Which mission-critical processes rely on a single provider? Which geographic corridors carry our most important data flows, and who actually controls the path between our applications and our users?

At this stage, edge delivery solutions such as a global Content Delivery Network (CDN)—for example, Cloudflare—become far more than performance optimization tools. They become essential components of a resilience strategy, diversifying network paths and service providers while introducing alternative traffic routes when a cloud region, infrastructure provider, or international connectivity corridor becomes disrupted.

The second shift is translating these findings into concrete architecture decisions. For some organizations, this means adopting a multi-cloud strategy, distributing workloads across multiple providers to prevent a commercial, regulatory, or technical decision by any single vendor from becoming a single point of failure. For others, it means strengthening geographic redundancy by replicating critical data across multiple regions, establishing alternative connectivity routes, partnering with multiple network operators, or promoting the use of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) that keep local traffic within the country or region whenever possible.

The same philosophy underpins Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) strategies supported by specialized platforms such as Infrascale. Business resilience is no longer simply about creating backups; it is about determining which systems must be restored first, how quickly they must recover, and what guarantees can be provided if a cloud platform, data center, or network segment becomes unavailable. Well-designed BC/DR architectures enable automated recovery orchestration, seamless failover to alternate environments, and continuous protection of critical business data without depending on a single production environment. In every case, the defining principle is anticipation: build resilience before an incident forces you to improvise it.

The third shift is integrating geopolitical awareness into digital strategy.

This does not require becoming an expert in international relations. It requires recognizing that technology decisions increasingly carry direct political, regulatory, and operational consequences. The choice of cloud providers, the geographic location of data, or dependence on technologies subject to export controls and international sanctions can directly affect business continuity. For organizations operating across borders, overlooking this dimension is equivalent to navigating without radar.

This is where orchestration becomes a strategic capability. Success no longer depends on deploying isolated technologies, but on coordinating infrastructure, cybersecurity, operational resilience, and technology governance within a unified business framework. This is precisely where integration and orchestration approaches such as those championed by Onistec create value—transforming technological complexity into organizational agility, aligning technical decisions with strategic priorities, and enabling organizations to respond with greater confidence as the external environment continues to evolve.

It would be easy to conclude that the dominance of a handful of powerful players and the vulnerability of global connectivity routes leave businesses at the mercy of forces beyond their control. Yet that conclusion would be incomplete. The other side of the story is that organizations have never had access to so much data, so many real-world experiences, and so many tools to build a more resilient position within this ecosystem. Documented disruption events, enterprise risk assessments, and resilience initiatives led by the European Union, NATO, regional organizations, and the broader technical community provide a solid foundation for informed action.

The real challenge is to redefine how organizations relate to the world's digital infrastructure. Businesses must evolve from passive users who place unquestioning trust in "the cloud" to informed stakeholders who understand their dependencies, demand greater transparency, and deliberately design their own resilience capabilities.

Ultimately, the truly disruptive realization is not that four technology companies wield unprecedented influence over the infrastructure that underpins the global economy. What is truly disruptive is recognizing that a mid-sized company, a regional enterprise, or even a local organization can choose not to be merely a passenger on that network. They can identify their dependencies, diversify their technology ecosystem, invest in resilience, and actively participate in the industry and public policy conversations that will shape the rules of the digital economy over the coming decade.

Digital infrastructure will remain invisible to most users. It can no longer remain invisible, however, to those responsible for making business decisions. In a world where submarine cables beneath the ocean sustain the economic activity above it, reducing dependence on powerful infrastructure providers is not about denying their essential role. It is about ensuring that every organization develops the capability to continue operating—even when that infrastructure comes under strain. Those who understand where their dependencies lie will be far better positioned to determine their own future when the next disruption inevitably arrives.

Roberto Massa Suárez

Strategic Consultant | Corporate Communications | Business Intelligence & Governance | Onistec, LLC

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cables-nubes-y-poder-c%C3%B3mo-las-rutas-invisibles-de-internet-massa-ruk3c/

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