Building redundancy into your application delivery infrastructure is a crucial part of making it more resilient in the face of surging user demand and outages. For example, companies are distributing applications across multiple data center locations, implementing multi-cloud strategies, investing in multi-CDNs, or some combination of all of these.
In this environment, conditions change quickly and unpredictably. Slow downs or disruptions in application performance can lead to unhappy users, churn, and revenue loss. You need a way to navigate through complexity and uncertainty to ensure consistently exceptional application experiences that move your business forward.
DNS-based global traffic management supports your resilience and redundancy goals by enabling you to:
- Automatically steer away from unhealthy endpoints
- Automate VPN traffic steering
- Connect diverse and distributed architecture
All of which, in turn, can help make your network more reliable and agile. Keep reading for a breakdown of how global traffic management helps to build resiliency within your IT infrastructure.
Or, for a deeper dive, catch a replay of our recent webinar, Global Traffic Management at the Cloud Edge: Opportunities and Best Practices.
Connect Diverse and Distributed Architecture
Enterprises are increasingly adopting more diverse and distributed infrastructure, which is an integral part of building resiliency into your application delivery environment. High profile cloud provider outages highlight the need for a multi-cloud environment to ensure 100% uptime of your website and applications. If one cloud provider experiences an outage, having a redundant endpoint can help protect you from lost revenue, damage to reputation, and a frustrating user experience.
A software-based global traffic management solution allows you to seamlessly route between different endpoints, whether private cloud, public cloud, or on-premises data center. With an API-first, independent solution, you can use real-time data on actual load at an endpoint and route traffic automatically to balance across your architecture. Furthermore, it gives you the flexibility to add and remove endpoints to your environment, no matter the vendor.
Automated Failover and Disaster Recovery
To get the full benefits of building out redundant infrastructure, look for a global traffic management solution with automated failover and disaster recovery mechanisms. This is what enables you to automatically redirect traffic seamlessly to a healthy endpoint if another is experiencing issues.
Most global traffic management solutions enable you to direct traffic across your infrastructure; however, a solution that includes automated and intelligent traffic steering capabilities will significantly improve performance, reliability, and cost. Additionally, look for an API-first solution that will integrate with cutting edge monitoring tools. This will allow you to detect outages or downtime 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.
Automated VPN Traffic Steering
Automated traffic steering isn’t just for your customer-facing websites and applications. With the majority of your workforce currently working fully remote, it has never been more important to ensure secure and fast access to the company VPN. Traditionally, VPNs have been designed to provide remote access to a small proportion of corporate employees, not to support full-time, company-wide remote work.
Implementing VPN traffic steering mitigates this issue by leveraging traffic steering policies to send workers to the optimal, healthy VPN site with the most capacity. If one site starts to hit capacity, intelligent traffic routing will automatically balance incoming connections across the entire network.
This ensures an optimal end user experience, rather than the traditionally frustrating and unproductive struggle to access the VPN. And most importantly, seamless VPN access reduces the likelihood that employees will circumvent the VPN altogether, therefore improving adherence to security and compliance policies. Given the fact that remote work is naturally more likely to occur over insecure networks or devices than in-office work, adherence to these policies is more important than ever.
Global traffic management is a key piece of the puzzle to ensuring your network is reliable, while still meeting new patterns in user demand. Look for a software-based solution that is API-first to build a more resilient application delivery network, and in turn, prepare your business to meet unexpected challenges.
For more information on best practices related to global traffic management, be sure to watch our recent webinar, Global Traffic Management at the Cloud Edge: Opportunities and Best Practices.