The first commercial installation of a Local Area Network (LAN) occurred in December 1977 at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. From then on, numerous computer magazines, over several years, would announce that year as "the year of the LAN." In truth, the real year of the LAN happened quietly in the 90s when the hardware cost dropped, and software that could communicate properly with that hardware came to fruition. At any rate, when LAN use eventually took off, it became the de facto transport for digital traffic in schools, hospitals and offices worldwide. For decades, IT organizations have been building, managing, and monitoring LANs. And then COVID happened.

Almost overnight, the writing was on the wall for LANs and on-prem systems - the office was empty. IT departments went from supporting 1,000 employees in one building to 1,000 employees across home offices, cafes and libraries. True, talk about LAN being made obsolete by WAN had been around for some time. But now we're seeing many companies shutting down their "old legacy network" and running their enterprise without a LAN, WAN, or an OnPrem datacenter. Everything is now on the Internet.

The Internet is the Network.

We're on the verge of a critical transitional moment in technology. Gone are the days when everything was on your local network: your CRM, Exchange email, file shares, and the print server. Today an organization can have email, communication systems, collaboration and development tools and business apps all on the cloud. The Internet is the new enterprise network, the cloud is the new data center, and SaaS is the new application stack.

And just like the LANs of old required a heightened level of attention, every company needs to monitor, manage and troubleshoot their Internet. Their Internet? 

Whose Internet is it anyway?

No one owns the Internet, but consider the first part of the modern web. Routers, firewalls, and ISPs are all under the control of the company. Then you've got the websites that drive the business, DNS hosting, multiple CDNs and cloud services. Then factor in your website payment providers, video hosting services, third-party libraries, analytics engines and other vendors and services. This multiplicity of dependencies makes up the new Internet stack that every organization needs to monitor.

How large a stack are we talking about? CNN's homepage, for example, requires over 600 dependencies to load. The fact that a page this complex loads in seconds is a technological feat.

Why Internet resilience matters

The continued shift to hybrid work has put unprecedented demands on home networks that weren't designed for high bandwidth use around the clock. More often than not, the solution is to add more servers and towers, which adds even more complexity to an already overburdened infrastructure. Global networks are being tested to their limits, and the Internet is creaking.

Speaking on the future of the Internet, Huawei's chief digital officer remarked that the Internet is more vulnerable now than at any point in recent memory. In the last few years, we have 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 tens of millions of dollars in losses. No wonder that every company needs to invest in Internet resilience.

The future of Internet Monitoring

Since the Internet is now essentially the network, it needs to be monitored differently. Traditional monitoring tools are no longer sufficient. There's a reason why observability is a buzzword that has become all the rage in the DevOps community in recent years: visibility across a stack is important - yet most IT teams are blind to what happens on the Internet, the essential connectivity that powers every digital experience today. Slow is the new down, and the loss of revenue that comes with that means resilience has now become a priority for businesses at the executive level.

"The Future Enterprise must address unevenness in connectivity across different environments and locations as employees, customer, and partners increasingly look for - and expect - digital experiences supported by ubiquitous, reliable and robust connectivity."- IDC Research

That's why Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) tools are essential for any organization that needs to understand, monitor, fix and optimize its Internet stack. IPM is a new generation of solutions that provide visibility into every layer of the Internet that impacts business.

How IPM differs from APM

APM tools concentrate on code and everything that impacts an application. IPM, on the other hand, focuses on the network, looking at everything that affects the customer, workforce, and application (or API) experience over the Internet.

Further, APM monitors the cloud from the cloud  - ideal for optimizing applications, less so for understanding and optimizing customer or workforce experience. After all, customers and employees access systems via their devices, through a wireless network or an ISP, not from the cloud. On the other hand, IPM tools can observe performance from critical Internet locations, including top-tier last mile, backbone, wireless, cloud, and multi-access edge computing providers. For instance, only an IPM tool can explain the difference in experience between a user connecting via Verizon in Boston connected to Cloudflare CDN versus a user connecting using T-Mobile broadband in Frankfurt on Fastly's CDN.

LAN's curtain call?

Network engineers have been configuring and managing routers and switches and connecting PCs and data centers using a myriad of cables since the birth of the computer age. As the walls of global offices become more fluid, however, will we see LANs disappear completely? Probably not. The trickle back to the office that started a year or so ago feels like it's truly gathering pace, with an increasing number of big companies such as Google, Twitter and Snapchat mandating more time in the office. What's for certain is that LANs won't play the pivotal role in technology they've played over the last 44 years. The baton has been passed well and truly to the Internet. The call to action is for every IT organization to balance the investment in LAN and APM monitoring and optimization with the investment required in IPM, which is essential for every organization to thrive in the age of the Internet.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gerardo is an experienced technologist with over 20 years of experience in digital strategies and web technologies who has been at the center of the Web, Mobile, Social, and Cloud revolutions. He has led marketing positions at SolarWinds, Microsoft, Rackspace, Datacore, and Bazaarvoice. Before joining Catchpoint, Gerardo was the CMO for Keeper Security.