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Consolidating on one platform is efficient — but for mission-critical applications, some organizations deliberately run two edge providers. A multi-vendor architecture removes the provider itself as a single point of failure.
Why go dual-vendor?
- Availability: if one provider has an outage, the other keeps apps online.
- No lock-in: commercial and technical leverage with both vendors.
- Coverage: different providers have different regional strengths.
- Defense in depth: a gap in one WAF may be caught by the other.
How traffic is steered
| Model | How it works | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Active / Passive | Primary carries traffic; secondary on standby via DNS failover | Cost-sensitive, simpler operations |
| Active / Active | Both serve traffic simultaneously (DNS or BGP steering) | Highest availability, revenue-critical apps |
The trade-off
Dual-vendor adds cost and operational complexity — two consoles, two rule sets to keep in sync. It's justified for revenue-critical or high-risk applications, less so for typical SMB workloads.
IDENETY guidance: most SMBs are best served by a single well-architected edge. We reserve dual-vendor designs for customers with strict uptime SLAs or regulatory resilience requirements — and we manage the synchronization so it actually works when tested. See our global load balancing guide for the traffic steering layer, and our DDoS protection guide for the security layer.
Contact our engineers to discuss resilience architecture or dual-provider design for your critical applications.