3 Steps to Prevent Internet Outages at Your Business

Widespread outages are inevitable and plague even the most sophisticated service providers. They are also growing increasingly common, with reported outages up 142% in 2021 alone. It’s now less a question of if you’ll experience an outage, but when.

And as the world becomes more reliant on digital services and applications, the stakes are higher than ever. McKinsey predicts, for example, that by 2030 companies will lose roughly $650 billion as a result of system downtime and cybersecurity breaches.

So what steps can you take to prevent - or at least mitigate - the effects of future outages? Keep reading to learn how your organization can improve resilience against outages by:

• Building redundancy into key systems

• Improving visibility and enable automation

• Streamlining management of key systems

Step 1: Build Redundancy into Key Systems

The complexity of today’s application environments and the demand for faster innovation and deployment increase the likelihood that an outage will occur - whether due to service provider issues, deployment errors, or other problems.

That’s why it is critical to build redundancy into your most critical infrastructure, so when issues arise, you have backup options. For example, implement a multi-CDN strategy, redundant DNS providers, multiple cloud providers, and so on.

Think back to the 2016 Dyn outage as an example. Dyn was victim to a massive DDoS attack, and brought down some of the most heavily trafficked applications in the world with it. The lessons learned after the 2016 outage didn’t seem to stick; recently, Carnegie Mellon researchers found that 84.8% of the top 100,000 websites still relied upon a single DNS provider, leaving them vulnerable to another outage. Many still rely upon a single cloud provider as well, as evidenced by the number of sites that have gone down in recent months during cloud provider outages.

With failover options in place like redundant DNS or multi-cloud, you can steer away from the affected provider, and minimize the impact to your business.

Step 2: Improve Visibility and Enable Automation of Failover Mechanisms

To get the full benefits of building out redundant infrastructure, make sure you build in automated failover and disaster recovery mechanisms. This enables you to automatically redirect traffic seamlessly to a healthy endpoint if another is experiencing issues. Your application delivery environment can change quickly, and without automated routing policies you are still vulnerable to outages or downtime.

To catch issues before they affect your end-users, look for an intelligent, API-first traffic routing solution that integrates with leading observability and monitoring tools such as AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, or DataDog. This will allow you to detect outages or availability issues in real time, and in turn leverage smart failover to healthier resources. This results in better availability and more uptime, and keeps your business online even during outages.

Step 3: Streamline Management of Key Infrastructure

However, without the right internal management system, adding redundant infrastructure and tools that enable automation and better visibility can have the unwanted effect of increasing the likelihood you’ll experience issues or disruptions. Look for a solution that makes it easy to deploy, configure, and monitor your infrastructure, and integrates well with the rest of your tech stack.

How NS1 Helps Businesses Improve Resilience Against Outages

Our bundle of outage mitigation solutions provides network and application teams with the leverage and capabilities necessary to dynamically route around problems in the event of provider outages or DDoS attacks — all before users are impacted. The solution delivers DNS redundancy and failover through NS1’s Managed DNS and Dedicated DNS.

Additionally, powerful, dynamic traffic steering through NS1’s patented Filter Chain technology enables teams to route traffic among multiple clouds or CDNs to accommodate traffic spikes or divert traffic to available resources in the event a provider is experiencing problems. As a result, users are shielded from outages and localized network events that would otherwise interrupt business operations.

Additionally, teams can simplify internal management across their entire network footprint — from the cloud to the edge — through NS1 Connect. The platform makes it easy to deploy, configure, and monitor NS1 solutions, as well as to integrate external data sources and control points to maximize the effectiveness of a team’s response to incidents that impact availability.

Learn more about NS1’s solution to mitigate outages by viewing the following resources: