How To Develop A Business Continuity Plan

In our previous post, we laid out the problems of business continuity and Internet Performance Management in today’s online environment.

In this article, we will take a look at some of the ways you can use traffic steering capabilities to execute business continuity planning and provide some ideas on how proper use of Internet Performance Management can help you leverage the Internet and the capabilities of cloud-based services.

Leveraging The Internet

Effective Internet Performance Management means leveraging the Internet to your advantage-through proper visibility, planning, monitoring and action, and refusing to be held hostage by “Internet issues”, which seem to be beyond your control. The key is to see, understand, and assess Internet conditions in real time so that you are able to react and plan best-fit routing and react to bottlenecks that cause such widespread service degradation. Actionable insights into Internet routing options make all the difference when you want to deliver excellent service via the Internet.

One of the first steps in developing a solid business continuity plan is to ensure redundancy at every level of your infrastructure, including your hosting locations, CDNs, and DNS services. Redundancy removes your dependency on any single point of failure, which could lead to widespread outages. With hosting locations and CDNs, redundancy may be accomplished by replicating your application across multiple locations within a single provider, or bringing in multiple providers to increase your options in the event of infrastructure problems. From the DNS standpoint, a secondary DNS network ensures end users are always able to reach your online infrastructure, regardless of where it may be located.

Global research firm Gartner summed it up succinctly: “Without properly functioning external DNS, Internet-based resources may “disappear” without warning. For enterprises with Web and cloud-based applications and content, external DNS solutions offer reliability, performance and traffic management beyond that of traditional open-source-based solutions.”

Once you’ve ensured you have redundancy across all levels of your infrastructure, you’ll want to ensure end users get routed to the location that’s best able to deliver a positive experience. Today’s webpages are becoming increasingly complex and distributed, requiring content to be downloaded from several locations for every page load. 

Each of these requests for content creates an opportunity to improve the end user’s experience, but also introduces the risk of creating a negative experience.

It’s important to identify where the end user is located, and then which infrastructure selections are best situated to deliver content to that location. By implementing an Internet Performance Management solution, you can monitor all of your infrastructure so that end users are only sent to locations that are available to respond to requests and topologically near the end user so that the actual download of content and assets is minimized as much as possible. Proper planning and monitoring of this internet-dependent infrastructure can help you tackle business objectives such as reducing cost, mitigating risk and increasing revenue.

Advanced Tools and Monitoring

Dyn, an Internet Performance Management company, delivers a platform solution capable of providing both simple and advanced internet routing tools and monitoring, personalized for the demands of your business. Dyn’s platform rests on three interdependent pillars: Traffic steering, data collection, and an analytical decision making engine. This is a strong foundation. Their traffic steering relies on 15 years of experience, a world-class DNS network, and 20 physical locations around the world capable of providing load balancing, failover, and dynamic steering capabilities that optimize end user reachability and performance. The data collection is peerless, with over 200 vantage points collecting 6B latency measurements daily and API hooks that allow you to ingest this data into your monitoring tools. Last but not least, the analytical engine has a suite of Internet intelligence products to turn rich data into actionable insights.

If you want to achieve improved Internet performance on a large scale, then you would be well served to employ a cloud-based Internet Performance Management solution that can accelerate resolution of issues, scale globally, provide strong security and easy to use API’s for superior performance.

In the next post of this series we will uncover real examples on how Business Continuity plans can drastically influence business success.

Sponsored series by Dyn

By Jeremy Daniel