Dyn analyses connections to the cloud

While cloud providers manage the connection of their customers to cloud services, the risk is a loss of Internet performance visibility and control. "It becomes a matter of trusting your cloud provider to provide the best Internet performance possible and you won’t know if it would or not until customers complain or leave—an uncomfortable position for any ambitious business,” noted Martin Ryan, Vice President, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Dyn, which provides intelligence tools to help customers get Internet visibility and take back control of the end-user experience.

According to Ryan, the dangers are quite real. For example, routing errors can occur when the IP addresses that distinguish unique Internet connections are switched around. “There are thousands of authorised and unauthorised IP address changes every day across the Internet. Web-dependent businesses need to be vigilant and ensure that their IP addresses point where they are supposed to go. If IP addresses are wrong, business can be lost, data security can be compromised, and Internet performance can suffer,” he warned.

“The chance is pretty high (>80%) that a customer's IP addresses will change. But, the chance that a change is malicious is pretty small (<5%). These statistics, however, may be more significant than the absolute numbers indicate. First, mistakes that occur quite often can still be costly. A company that mistakenly changes one of your IP addresses can still affect you and if you are not monitoring IP address changes, business can be disrupted for days. And even though malicious events are relatively rare, a single malicious hijack or forced outage can be a reputation-effecting event and cost millions. Finally, as evidenced by recent events in Nepal, natural disasters and in Syria, geopolitical events, can destroy infrastructure and sever connections between you and your customers.”

Ryan stressed that businesses based in Asia Pacific can be affected by problems happening around the globe. “Dyn Research is constantly showing Internet issues that have massive impact such as the effects of the recent Nepal earthquake. As to problems that originated in the Asia Pacific market, last year we posted a blog post called Indonesia Hijacks the World in which Indosat, one of Indonesia’s largest telecommunications providers, leaked large portions of the global routing table multiple times over a two-hour period,” said Ryan. 

“This means that, in effect, Indosat claimed that it ‘owned’ many of the world’s networks. This mistake had varying affects around the world but the highest impact were for companies in Afghanistan, Russia, India,the UK and the US.”

Dyn’s portfolio, which monitors, analyses and controls Internet performance, include Internet Alerts that let customers know when and how an IP asset status has changed, and Internet Intelligence which can show alternative paths to maintain business continuity. Dyn's Internet Intelligence products can also compare the performance of the world's best transit carriers.

“Internet performance variability means that you must monitor and compare vendors constantly. Although it is a good practice in general, Dyn believes this is especially true in the Asia Pacific region,” said Ryan, noting that connectivity can be quite variable in this region.

“Most network-oriented performance tools look at how your company connects their assets together and how well you connect to the Internet—very important, but a one-sided view. Dyn gives you the view of how your end-users connect to your company’s online infrastructure, which in terms of gauging the quality of the end-user experience, is really the key. Dyn has hundreds of network sensors collecting billions of data points every day so that your company can see Internet performance to you from anywhere in the world—no one else does this,” he said.