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Building Internet Resilience will be a top priority

By Howard Beader, Vice President of Product Marketing for Catchpoint

Today, your company is a tech company, no matter what products or services it provides. IKEA is a tech company that makes furniture. Nike is a tech company that makes sneakers.

It wasn't always like this.

Not so long ago, IT was a sector and companies relied upon their own internal networks. Ensuring customers and employees could access the digital experiences that drove the business was more straightforward. The Internet changed all of that. Nowadays, the Internet is the network, cloud is the new data center, and the visibility companies once had to ensure exceptional experiences is now more challenging than ever to acquire.

Why Internet resilience will become an enterprise priority in 2023

Significant Internet disruptions are on the increase. There are a few reasons for this, one of them being that the Internet was originally never designed for business. Conceived five decades ago as a research tool, the Internet's design didn't factor in security, let alone the complex demands of e-commerce.

Another factor is the rocket fuel that COVID added to the shift to distributed architectures. Global networks are feeling the strain of millions of hybrid-workers working on home networks that weren't designed for round-the-clock high bandwidth use. So, it's no coincidence that in the last few years, we've seen multiple instances of major sites and providers going down because of a misconfigured CDN, a BGP hijack or a DNS resolution failure, often causing considerable losses in revenue.

Brian Krebs's assertion that the Internet is held together by spit and baling wire is spot on. Far from being a magically resilient, infallible network, the modern web is highly fragile, constantly evolving and requires multiple networks, protocols, agents and sub-systems to work together in the blink of an eye. No wonder the modern web needs constant attention and the right strategy to ensure its resilience.

Why Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) is the future of web monitoring

It's easy to see why observability has become such a hot topic in recent years - many IT teams are blind to what happens on the Internet. It's unfortunate that there's so much confusion around observability. A quick google search for observability vendors brings back hundreds of thousands of results and a whole host of new and confusing definitions and buzzwords to wade through: Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), APM and NPM, AIOps and, of course, observability, including all its three pillars and its four golden signals.

Digging deeper into these results, you'll find as many solutions as there are definitions, all with similar messaging around ensuring a great digital experience for your customers, employees, or both. At best, many of these solutions help ensure that sites are live and available but lack the all-important end-to-end visibility across the Internet. And that's exactly what sets IPM apart.

IPM provides deep visibility into every aspect of the Internet that impacts your business. While APM tools focus on code, IPM focuses on the network. While APM tries to look at everything that impacts an application (database wait times, inefficient code, resource bottlenecks), IPM looks at everything that impacts the customer, workforce, application (or API) experience over the Internet.

Why our perception of tool sprawl will change

A perception peddled by many a vendor is that you can do everything with a single solution, as it's "good enough," and that adding more tools to your stack contributes to tool sprawl. We believe that's one of the things that's going to change moving forward. We're already seeing more and more companies using APM to ensure their application stack runs well, and IPM to ensure their internet stack runs well. That, in our opinion, does not represent tool sprawl.

Allow me to explain.

Tool sprawl, as defined in the 2023 SRE Report, is not simply the number of tools in the stack, but a comparison of the received value of the tools in the stack versus their cost. So, if the received value is higher than the cost, there is no tool sprawl problem. Moving forward, we predict more and more companies will be more willing to combine monitoring solutions according to their business needs. An enterprise needing deep visibility into their application environment will use APM. If they need to automate their IT operations, they'll use AIOps. And if they rely on the Internet as their network, they'll use IPM.

Conclusion

The Internet turned 53 recently, showing remarkable longevity. However, now that the Internet is the de facto mode of transport for all digital traffic, the need for resilience has never been more critical. Roll in 2023.    

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Howard Beader is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Catchpoint, where he's responsible for driving the go-to-market strategy, solution marketing plans and tactics globally across Catchpoint's solution portfolio.

Before joining Catchpoint, Howard was Sr. Director of Product Marketing for ServiceNow, where he was responsible for bringing Creator Workflows and the Now Platform to market, building the developer program & the CreatorCon event, and the ServiceNow App Store.

Howard's other prior  experiences included being Vice President of Product Marketing for Everbridge, Vice President of Product Marketing for Oracle's Fusion Middleware portfolio. He's also been Group Product Manager at Microsoft, has led marketing at enterprise mobility startup organizations, and has been Director of Product Marketing and Solution Management with SAP AG.