I remember exactly where I was—sitting at my desk as the CIO of a regional bank in Central Pennsylvania—when the call came in. A manhole fire in Philadelphia had taken down 90% of our MPLS network. The only remaining circuit was our connection to our core provider from our operations center. Every branch was offline. Even our so-called “backup” circuits, provided by the same vendor, were down. Our team was pushed to the limit. Through grit, creativity, and considerable manual