It’s no exaggeration to say that the Internet is now the heart of the global economy. Competition is intense and the performance of an organization’s web-based assets can make or break its future. Business continuity, which is defined as the ability to survive either man-made or natural disasters without losing valuable data, revenue, or customers, is now a critical aspect of Internet Performance Management. The effectiveness of an online presence relies on a healthy Internet infrastructure that connects cloud, data centers and CDNs to customers, employees and partners.
The size, scale, and complexity of the data which is uploaded to the Internet annually is staggering. In 2015 alone, over 250 million new users gained access to the internet, connecting through more than 10 billion devices. Every 12-month period represents a quantum leap in the volume of online activity, and this trend is only likely to increase.
Without a robust, responsive Internet presence, a company will struggle to survive. The volume of traffic, the numbers of users and the amount of money spent online are compelling drivers. Yet there are real concerns around the issues of control, resiliency and security for organizations serving online clients.
Uncertainty over how to measure and analyze performance
An inability to control cost and quality with cloud providers
An incomplete view of internet traffic; and
A lack of visibility to plan for price, performance and scale
As companies move toward an Internet-dependent infrastructure, it is imperative that they find ways to maintain visibility and control in order to manage performance.
Visibility is a critical tool. It leads to effective planning for business scale, an optimal migration to cloud providers and it gives way to the right tools to optimize cloud performance and manage business continuity.
Management of downtime, including communication with clients, is also vital. Downtime is costly, and when clients are unable to access cloud-based information or monitor and manage their equipment remotely, they face the very real possibility of losing sales and eroding hard-won customer confidence.
A safety-first mindset is a valuable asset in this environment. Matt Larson, CTO at Dyn, a leader in Internet Performance Management solutions, puts it like this: “Assume every piece of technology you use in your business will break. Think about the time you spend making your data center components more reliable from redundant servers, power supplies and database servers to entire data center sites. Are any of these perfectly bulletproof? The record shows they are absolutely not.”
Now think about protecting from failure and Internet Infrastructure itself. Most companies do not even monitor the Internet backbone to know if there are problems and they do not build redundancy and failsafe into how their customers connect to their Internet assets such as cloud providers and CDNs. Business Continuity extends to an Internet Infrastructure that demands planning and dynamic agility to defeat outages, performance degradation, and security risks.
Every year brings new challenges and demands for internet performance managers. In the coming year, experts predict more security breaches, more mobile banking, greater peer-to-peer distribution and a surge in the viability of the Internet of Things. Whether you’re working with data centers, content delivery networks, cloud Service Providers or with SaaS providers, “the need for visibility, insights and control of Internet Performance has never been more prevalent across countries, service providers and enterprises,” writes Dyn Chief Strategic Officer Kyle York. “As the world flattens, as the Internet grows more complex and volatile, and as user demands for exceptional experiences heighten, 2016 will assuredly be a big year for Internet Performance.”
In the next post in this series, we’ll look at how to leverage the Internet to cope with the challenges of business continuity and gain a competitive advantage.
CDN Performance Series Provided By Dyn
By Jeremy Daniel
