Downtime is Pricy, Solution isn’t: How to Stay Out of DNS Outages

Francesco Altomare Southern Europe Regional Manager @ GlobalDots
4 Min read

The recent global DNS outages, with the latest addition of Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp, are a call to transform your approach to DNS solutions.

In this webinar, we explore whether cloud-borne environments are really fail-proof and how businesses can use the most advanced cybersecurity methods and DNS solutions to minimize their risk of server failures, code misconfigurations, DDoS attacks, and power outages.

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GlobalDots has joined forces with DNS innovator NS1 to introduce a website availability solution that will increase your uptime facing the all-too-common CDN and DNS outages we see lately – whether these are a result of a human error or a malicious attack.

Cybersecurity & The Cost of Downtime

We are reminded frequently that no business or industry is completely safe from service issues. By failing to invest in business continuity, your business becomes increasingly vulnerable to server failures, DDoS attacks, and power outages. Whether downtime is triggered by a cyberattack or your team needs to update a system or piece of software, the cost can be significant to your business. When you consider businesses that generate $1M in revenue a minute, being up and running is critical to financial security and sustainability. For companies that offer a service such as healthcare, downtime can put human lives at risk! Sadly, outages will happen, but there are ways to keep your business out of the kill zone, so to speak!

What’s really surprising when it comes to system reliability engineering is that many businesses, especially large ones, have never dealt with the assumption that downtime will impact performance at some point and so don’t have a redundant CDN layer in place that will cost them less than dealing with outages as and when they occur. Even by simply switching traffic to be served from your origins instead of another CDN, you can remain available and protect your brand reputation when your systems go down. Users do understand that businesses will be updated or need to address infrastructure issues from time to time, but not having a plan in place is planning to fail!

H2: Outdated DNS Infrastructure & Business Security

DNS isn’t a new product. So, how come the world’s biggest websites and vendors still suffer from outages?

What NS1 recognized eight years ago, Danielle explains, is that even though DNS is as old and road-tested as the internet itself, it wasn’t evolving at the pace needed by the world’s innovative internet companies in order to support a modern, resilient application delivery stack. While we know that DNS infrastructure needs to be programmable and API-driven, intelligent, and cloud-native, it is one of the most overlooked parts of a company’s infrastructure and security posture.

It is responsible for driving a massive amount of traffic, which is only ever appreciated when it stops working. When DNS is down and it’s critical to your company, business is likely going to grind to a halt. And sadly, for some customers, this can even become a matter of make-or-break. Therefore, maintaining a highly resilient and fault-tolerant DNS service is so important, Danielle explains.

Hear how NS1 helped Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, build eCommerce capabilities in Honduras and Costa Rica literally overnight to support home grocery delivery services during the global pandemic.

GlobalDots & NS1 Approach to DNS Infrastructure

NS1 operates by closely monitoring a large anycast DNS network with 26 PoP (points of presence) worldwide, Danielle explains. By taking a defense-in-depth approach to protecting infrastructure from large-scale DDoS attacks and other threats, we enhance business security. In fact, we’ve even built our own network observability tools to summarize high-volume network data streams in real-time, which we’ve released as open-source projects Pktvisor and Orb. By operating and securing our own resilient infrastructure, it’s important for DNS providers to provide resilience to their customers in multiple ways. This could be by supporting DNSSEC in multi-provider environments, enabling automatic detection and failover to steer around outages and service degradation, to supporting enterprise-grade business security controls within the service like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

To sum it up, a managed DNS solution helps clients increase uptime and become more resilient to downtime. DNS solutions can help you to:

  • Increase availability, reliability, and uptime for both your internal and external applications
  • Improve your cybersecurity and accelerate compliance
  • Safeguard your web assets against large-scale outages and service issues
  • Provide reliable and highly secure access to remote workers and key business partners

As a 17-year world leader in web & cloud innovation, GlobalDots pioneered the multi-vendor strategies for web performance and cost optimization, including custom-made Multi DNS per client. Our rich portfolio and deep knowledge go further into the realms of business security, corporate IT and DevOps. This makes GlobalDots an ideal technology partner for fast-growing companies, as we are:

  • Constantly tracking the industry to provide spot-on solutions for your ecosystem
  • Vendor-agnostics, an ever-evolving portfolio of customizable solutions that cater for each unique use case
  • Streamlining technology adoption
  • Analyzing your business profile & ecosystem, focusing on what really matters

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