CORE Media in association with Lightstorm, curated an exclusive closed-door session on ‘Building the resilient network for Cloud and AI Era’.
The session was moderated by Anoop Mathur, Founder, CORE Media Group, and featured insights from Mitesh Bharwada, VP – Product, Lightstorm.
Building a resilient network requires moving beyond conventional point-to-point architectures between data centres and metro cities. Lightstorm has focused on creating a smarter, more resilient network with three-path connectivity to ensure redundancy and uninterrupted operations. Mitesh also highlighted that, in many deployments, overhead fibre offers advantages over underground fibre due to faster restoration and easier maintenance.
To strengthen its network backbone, the company has signed 15-year Indefeasible Right of Use (IRU) agreements, enabling the development of its SmartNet infrastructure. This long-term investment provides enterprises with dedicated, scalable connectivity designed to support growing digital and cloud requirements.
The discussion also underlined Lightstorm’s Polarin, Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform, which enables enterprises to provision hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity within minutes. It emphasized that the industry conversation is shifting from cloud connectivity to core connectivity.
The conversation then turned to the practical challenges CIOs face in managing technology across diversified business environments. Leaders from large conglomerates noted that every line of business—from manufacturing and retail to other operational units—has distinct technology priorities, performance metrics, and operational requirements. As AI-powered workloads such as remote monitoring become integral to business operations, the ability to move data seamlessly across environments has emerged as a core capability. They also emphasized the need for real-time defect detection while production lines remain operational, alongside the challenge of managing network redundancy, backhaul capacity, and failures to ensure continuous, resilient operations across the enterprise.
Responding to these concerns, Mitesh emphasized that latency is not merely a network metric but a direct business risk in manufacturing environments. Even a brief increase in latency on the shop floor can disrupt operations and result in defective products being produced before corrective action is taken. He noted that true resilience comes at a cost, as organizations must invest in additional layers of core connectivity to ensure uninterrupted performance and failover capability.
Another key challenge highlighted was ensuring resilient core connectivity across increasingly distributed enterprise environments. While cloud-to-data centre connectivity has significantly improved, maintaining reliable connectivity to critical fixed destinations remains a priority. Participants pointed to persistent concerns around uptime, alternate network paths, and business continuity, particularly for organizations that rely on financial exchanges and latency-sensitive applications. They emphasized that uninterrupted connectivity between data centres and exchanges is mission-critical, as any disruption can directly impact business operations and service delivery.
Mitesh underscored that resilient connectivity cannot rest solely on the enterprise. With international connectivity increasingly dependent on subsea cable infrastructure and geopolitical uncertainties making global routes less predictable, service providers have an equally critical role in delivering protected circuits and diversified network paths.
Highlighting Lightstorm's approach, he noted that the company's three-path network is engineered to provide a minimum uptime guarantee of 98%, helping enterprises strengthen business continuity. He also shared that Lightstorm is in the process of being empanelled with the National Stock Exchange (NSE), with approval currently awaited, after which it will enable connectivity to BSE too.
Looking ahead, Mitesh added that Lightstorm's customer portal already provides real-time latency visibility, while the acquisition of RTI Cables and continued investments across the APAC region have further strengthened the company's international connectivity capabilities.
CIOs spoke about the challenges of managing large-scale distributed operations, with over 50,000 sites generating massive volumes of video data that require centralized GPU resources for AI workloads. Achieving this at scale while keeping costs under control remains a key priority.
Connectivity gaps at remote retail locations continue to impact operations. For banks serving customers across every corner of the country, ensuring higher uptime for offsite ATMs is a critical challenge, making resilient network connectivity essential for uninterrupted service delivery.
Sharing Lightstorm's roadmap, Mitesh revealed that the company is working with global telecom partners to launch AI Fabric in the coming months. The platform is designed to simplify AI infrastructure by intelligently aggregating data from distributed locations and routing it to centralized GPU resources, helping enterprises optimize the use of expensive compute infrastructure.
Built with network intelligence at its core, AI Fabric will automatically identify GPU congestion and seamlessly redirect workloads to the next available GPU, enabling efficient resource utilization, lower costs, and uninterrupted AI operations at scale.
Another challenge raised by CIOs was the need to scale bandwidth without impacting overall network performance. Enterprises require the flexibility to handle sudden spikes in workloads without choking the network, while also preferring a pay-as-you-use model that avoids overprovisioning and unnecessary costs.
Explaining Lightstorm's approach, Mitesh said the company's network enables bandwidth to be scaled on the fly, allowing enterprises to respond instantly to changing business demands. He added that Lightstorm has unbundled port capacity from bandwidth, enabling customers to provision them independently. This approach minimizes resource wastage, delivers greater flexibility, and results in significant cost savings.
For CIOs, the real measure of resilience is not whether the network stays up, but whether the business keeps running. With digital operations becoming mission-critical, they stressed the need for intelligent fallback mechanisms and predictive analytics that can anticipate failures before they disrupt services.
Offering a different perspective, Mitesh observed that no cloud environment can ever be completely immune to failures, as software remains at its core. He explained that Lightstorm addresses this with virtual routing capabilities, enabling enterprises to deploy virtual routers in the data centre of their choice and create customized routing policies. This allows workloads to be redirected seamlessly, strengthening business availability and operational resilience.
