A survey of 310 IT or digital business leaders published today finds 43% have experienced Internet performance degradations or outages that resulted in revenue losses that exceeded $1 million.
Conducted by Catchpoint, a provider of an Internet performance monitoring (IPM) platform, a total of 9% said losses exceeded $10 million.
A full 97% of respondents said reliable, resilient Internet is of utmost importance to their business success, with more than three quarters (78%) citing improved customer experience as the key driver for the Internet resilience initiatives, followed by improved operational efficiency (70%) and securing/protecting revenue streams (66%).
Nearly half (49%) said ensuring resiliency requires organizations to mandate an embrace of best practices to ensuring availability, the survey finds.
However, more than half (51%) cited cost or budget as their top obstacle for achieving resiliency, followed closely by technology limitations (49%).
The challenge is that Internet services today are dependent on a hodgepodge of networks that have dependencies that are difficult to ascertain, says Leo Vasiliou, director of product marketing for Catchpoint. “There is too much fragmentation,” he says.
In fact, more than half (53%) identified investment in technology and tools as their biggest need to ensure Internet resiliency, followed closely by aligning IT with business outcomes (45%) and additional facilities and data centers (45%.) More than three-quarters of respondents (77%) also said third-party technology providers are extremely or highly critical to their Internet Resilience success.
Digital services today are dependent on a wide range of networks that make up an Internet stack; each of which can adversely impact the performance of distributed applications. Everything from virtual private networks (VPNs) and content delivery networks (CDNs) to domain name system (DNS) servers and switches adds latency that, depending on how network traffic is being routed, can have a major impact on application performance. Any one of these services might be experiencing an outage or, more challenging to detect, intermittent degradations that unpredictably impact application performance. Whether it’s a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application being accessed in the cloud or Internet of Things (IoT) platform running at the network edge, pinpointing which Internet service might be the root cause of an issue requires an ability to monitor and observe that traffic.
Surfacing the insights needed in a way that provides the context required to optimize and troubleshoot a specific application without any visibility into the Internet stack becomes an impossible challenge. All the time and effort spent building an application can come to naught, simply because no one clearly understood the impact network latency would have on an application before it was deployed. Even after an application is deployed, any change to the way network traffic is being routed can have major consequences. Without any means of understanding what changes may have occurred, it might be weeks or months before an organization realizes it may need log a service request or switch service providers.
Obviously, the success of any digital service is closely tied to the quality of the Internet service provided. The issue Digital CxOs need to come to terms with is just how much potential revenue is being lost, simply because the Internet services upon which they depend are wholly unreliable.
