The SaaS industry has been going through a major shift in just the last few years, which is redefining how platforms are designed. System and network administrators are demanding all-in-one platforms for a variety of management tasks. The managed DNS industry, for one, has been radically altered by this shift. Both new and existing DNS providers are rolling out integrated platforms, which combine the analytical power of monitoring with advanced query management.
The Internet has been abuzz as the skeptical sys admins question how these integrated platforms can fix issues their predecessors couldn’t. And can you replace your current toolset with an all-in-one platform?
The principal idea behind these platforms is synergy, a mutually dependent relationship between monitoring and management. This technology is made possible by the cloud, which allows information to be shared between the two services in real time. The cloud foundations for all-in-one platforms have also proven to make these subscription services noticeably cheaper.
So what is this synergistic secret sauce that makes these all-in-one services so revolutionary? In the case of DNS management, network monitoring is integral to efficient query routing. What’s the point of making changes to your network configurations if you can’t monitor and analyze the results? This can also be applied the other way around: what’s the point in monitoring your network if you can’t fix the problems that you identify?
Traffic management should never feel like a shot in the dark, rather it should be informed and calculated to provide the best result for each individual end-user. The new integrated platform push is forcing admins to rethink how they manage their organizations’ traffic.
The problem is, too many admins think these tools are only used for anticipating DDoS or resolving attacks and outages. To be frank, outages are rare, but they can be devastating. DNS management has shifted from outage resolution to performance optimization. Next-generation managed DNS solutions will take a look at your entire network and implement changes to improve the experience for all of your end-users—individually optimized for each user’s location, browser, IP connectivity, and more.
Admins aren’t wrong for wanting to use query management for security reasons. That’s because DNS traffic operates at a critical ingress point for managing incoming traffic; as in, you can filter and root out malicious traffic before it even reaches your site. But what most admins seem to forget is these same management tools can be used to eliminate latency and improve network performance.
End-users are demanding faster load times, especially from mobile sites. DNS resolution times are only one portion of load time, but 50% of page load time is taken up by network latency overhead. Admins have to leverage every layer of the stack for optimal performance, or get left behind.
All-in-one management solutions are proving to be invaluable during high traffic periods. You can analyze traffic loads and redirect segments of traffic so that it’s balanced across many different resources or locations. You can also use this technology to minimize resolution times, by ensuring queries are being answered at the nearest possible server, or most optimally performing server (in case the closest one is under strain or underperforming).
These platforms are also incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze areas causing performance degradation and then make changes to alleviate them before they can cause appreciable affects to end-users. Some AI’s are paired with automated services that are able to recognize performance trends and patterns. They then use the analytics to anticipate and even predict potential attacks or fluctuations.
These all-in-one suites have created a new breed of traffic management, called Internet Traffic Optimization Services (ITOS). This new industry seeks to redefine the way admins manage their networks, by harnessing the power of analytics to make informed proactive changes. DNS is a user’s first and most impactful step when accessing a website, which is why ITOS places a strong emphasis on informed DNS management.
In the end, it all comes down to the cold hard stats. In order to get the most ROI out of a service, you need to look for reliability, cost efficiency, and proven performance improvements. All-in-one and ITOS solutions may still be in their formative years, but these solutions provide admins with all the tools they need in one platform. Now admins can see the performance improvement of their configurations in real time, while still costing less than non-integrated services.
By Steven Job
