How we saved car sharing from attacks in the deep sea

Car sharing with INVERS is a global business model and must work around the clock, 365 days a year. Customers don't want to stand in front of the cars and wait for a long time. It should only take a few seconds at most. The effort we invest in this is already very high. When our monitoring system with measuring points in Asian sounded the alarm a while ago and our friends in Singapore complained about longer waiting times and timeouts, we started an analysis.

The data is routed via global fiber optic connections that run between the continents over land and through the sea. The suspicion quickly arose that some of the data traffic from Southeast Asia was actually supposed to go over a connection that was damaged. Among 15+ submarine cables in the Red Sea, 4 of them (Seacom, TGN, AAE-1, EIG) are cut which we estimated impact 25% of traffic. Some of the traffic could be rerouted via China, the USA or alternative cables. Repairs are proving difficult due to the unclear political situation and attacks on merchant ships. Communication between the on-board computers and our servers could be rerouted and there were no measurable outages. However, some of the local internet providers were still using the damaged routes to access our servers. Together with the hosting teams, we thought about how we could help our customers in the region. We came up with the idea of installing direct access from us to the systems in the region, via which we would route the traffic to us. After some coordination, design considerations and discussions with the partners, we were able to implement this quickly, as we have a large part of our value chain under our control. Our friends in the region can now access our systems again at the usual speed and customers have access to the vehicles within a few seconds. This is how we saved shared mobility in difficult times.