The Internet is Consistently Unreliable - What Can You Do About It?

The Internet is consistently unreliable. That is the key takeaway from data provided by ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc. Between March 7th and 12th alone there were 388 global outages, which is slightly less than the previous week at 392 global outages. The report also found that 30 percent of these internet outages occurred within business hours, impacting businesses and customers across the globe.

The world is becoming ever more dependent on applications for work, our daily lives, and solving some of society's biggest challenges. For companies, reliable and performant application delivery is increasingly important to their bottom line. According to Gartner, 98% of companies reported that a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000; 33% reported that an hour of downtime costs their business $1-5 million.

While the internet has only grown in importance, it isn’t any more stable than it was when it was created. That’s because the Internet we have today wasn’t built for the speed, scale and dependance we have on applications.

The ability to keep customers, partners and employees securely connected to websites, external applications, enterprise networks and internal applications at all times is paramount to business success. Complex application environments, coupled with demand for faster innovation and deployment, increase the risk of error, vulnerabilities, and downtime.

Yet even if your company has taken steps to improve the resilience of your application delivery environment, external factors such as catastrophic natural events and pervasive cybercrime threaten to disrupt business applications. And even if you account for these disruptions, your business can often be at the mercy of these major internet outages, like the Dyn outage that took place earlier this month.

Companies need to control what is in their power, and mitigate against the outages that are not. That is why building network resilience is so important. The keys to building network resilience are to ensure reliability, security and agility.