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Katie Tregurtha
Posted by
Katie Tregurtha on
September 14, 2020

5 Ways Platform-Based DNS and Traffic Steering Can Improve Business Performance

How you connect with your customers and employees requires an increasingly complex array of applications. With the right infrastructure in place, these applications enable better performance and richer interactions - your employees can access company data safely from multiple devices, or your customers can interact with your product and website via mobile app, web browser, and IoT-powered device.

Developing and managing new, complex applications may seem like a major pain point for your company. However, most companies are not limited by their ability to develop and use new technologies, but rather, by the underlying infrastructure supporting these new technologies.

Upgrading this infrastructure and scaling it as needed requires a SaaS platform-based approach to DNS and traffic management. In a session for our recently held INS1GHTS2020 conference, NS1 product experts Terry Bernstein, Emily Pali, and Sanjay Ramnath outlined how the landscape has changed - keep reading for their insights into how a modern, platform-based DNS and traffic steering system can improve your company’s bottom line.



Balance performance objectives and cost objectives

When steering user traffic to the most efficient endpoint, you need to take into account multiple factors: geographical location of the user, the cost of directing a user to a specific endpoint, load balancing, and previous commits in place with your CDNs. You can build out the rules for traffic steering manually, but balancing different objectives quickly becomes complicated.

A flexible platform that integrates with the rest of your network ecosystem allows you to gather real-time data on server capacities, site reliability and performance, and automate traffic steering based upon your chosen objectives and limits. With an algorithmic approach, you can automatically balance competing objectives like cost savings and performance for the end user. You can then also easily analyze and review traffic distribution to tweak your rules as needed.

Use real-time internet conditions to ensure 100% uptime and peak performance for users

A key reason to invest in intelligent, automated traffic management is optimal user experience. These days, your users are more demanding than ever before: they expect to be able to access applications from any location, and have little patience for lags, outages or downtime.

Intelligent traffic steering can be the difference between an optimal user experience and a frustrating one. With it, you can automatically direct traffic based upon real-time conditions, such as where your user is located, server capacity, and demand for each data server. It can also help you bypass servers that are down in real-time. Competition for your users is fierce; ensuring an optimal user experience is crucial to retaining and attracting new customers.

Ensure a unified application experience across a growing number of network touchpoints

These days, your users interact with your products and services across various devices: desktop browsers, IoT devices, mobile, and so on. To enable that access, your network infrastructure is equally dispersed across private data centers, public clouds, and edge networks.

To link all these devices and access points seamlessly, you need a platform that integrates with an ever-growing list of systems and services. Without that integration, it's nearly an insurmountable task to package applications across different clouds and data centers, or route users efficiently to the correct endpoint. With it, your users are ensured a seamless experience accessing your products and services, no matter what device they’re using or where they’re located. Plus, a flexible DNS and traffic management platform will allow your company to easily implement new tools and applications into your existing infrastructure.

Empower your IT / network professionals to implement cutting edge “infrastructure as code” trends

As your network infrastructure grows more complex, your DevOps teams’ workload can quickly get out of control. To manage these systems and ensure they are functioning well, your DevOps professionals are increasingly using code to provision, configure and manage your network infrastructure (“infrastructure as code”), rather than traditional onsite work. They’re likely using multiple systems to conduct this work, all of which need to integrate with your larger network ecosystem. A flexible platform that integrates with these systems will empower your team to use these new tools to manage your infrastructure. Additionally, it will scale to integrate with any new tools that come along.

This trend only accelerated when most teams switched to fully remote work this year due to the pandemic. As they will likely continue to have very limited access to your onsite network infrastructure, it’s even more important for your team to be able to manage your infrastructure remotely.

Support your remote workforce with a high-performing VPN

Of course, it wasn’t just your IT team that had to switch to remote work earlier this year; most companies are still operating with the majority of their employees working remotely. Your internal network infrastructure (i.e., your VPN) was likely configured to support a small percentage of your employees working remote at any one time, as most workers typically accessed company data onsite.

As you scale up remote work network capacity, intelligent traffic steering can improve performance for your employees in the same manner that it does for your external users. With it, your employees are automatically steered to the nearest healthy VPN site with capacity. This ensures your employees can access the VPN without issues, which will naturally make it easier for them to do their jobs and reduce frustration.

New application and workforce trends are stretching the limits of traditional application stacks. The modern application network demands a convergence in application connectivity, application delivery, and operations. These requirements can be best addressed through a flexible platform that scales with your company as it grows.


Missed INS1GHTS 2020?

Don't miss our next INS1GHTS Days on September 23-24 for sessions on containers and virtualization.