Goodbye LAN. The Internet is the Network.

We are at the cusp of an important technology transformation. A discontinuity in technology as Peter Drucker would call it (precipitated by Covid).

For decades, IT organizations invested in building, managing, and monitoring LANs. Everything was on your local network: your CRM, your Exchange email, the file shares, and the print server.

Today, many companies are shutting down their “old legacy network” and are running their enterprise without a LAN, WAN, or an OnPrem datacenter. Everything is now on the Internet.

Which means, the Internet is the Network.

And just like in the ‘old’ days every company had to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot their on-prem network, now every company needs to monitor, manage and troubleshoot their Internet.

Their Internet? Yes. Routers, firewalls, and ISPs are the first part of the Internet every company controls. As well as DNS, multiple CDNs, cloud services, and websites. Also included are vendors and services such as website payment providers, analytics engines, video hosting services, third party libraries, and many more.

Let’s look at CNN as an example. Here is a graphic generated by WebPageTest (powered by software by Simon Hearne) that shows there are over 600 dependencies for the homepage of CNN to load.

When you think about this, it’s quite incredible that a page this complex loads in seconds, according to the latest we ran on webpagetest.org.

All these dependencies are the new Internet Stack that every business, brand, retailer, and global organization needs to monitor, manage, and optimize. This is what the Internet Stack looks like:

Why does it demand a heightened level of attention? Because the Internet is not a magically resilient, infallible network. Quite the contrary. It is a highly complex system that requires multiple networks, protocols, agents and sub-systems to work together, often in milliseconds, to perform. Internet Resilience is quickly becoming a top enterprise priority.

“Resilience and improving critical IT infrastructure are top priorities among I&O and other IT leaders…resilience is the primary investment driver for 63% of these cloud technologies", Gartner Research, August 2021

In the last few years, we have seen multiple instances of major sites, providers, hyperscalers...going down because of a misconfigured CDN, a BGP hijack or a DNS resolution failure, often causing tens of millions of dollars in losses. No wonder that every company needs to invest in Internet resilience.

Running a business without visibility into your Internet stack is like driving a car without a dashboard. Actually, it’s like flying a plane with your investors and employees counting on you to make the right decisions, without a dashboard – and without the ability to react quickly to anything that might impact your business.

“The Future Enterprise must address unevenness in connectivity across different environments and locations as employees, customer, and partners increasingly look for – and expect – digital experiences supported by ubiquitous, reliable and robust connectivity.”- IDC Research

This is why, for the last fourteen years, we have been building Catchpoint as the leading Internet Performance Monitoring platform, going broader than anyone else in the industry with thousands of vantage points around the world and deeper than anyone else into the core elements of the Internet stack like BGP and MQTT. No one comes close.

We are proud to say today that the top 6 cloud service providers in the world, the 4 leading global retailers, 9 of the top 10 CDNs, the largest MSPs, and many other global leading brands rely on Catchpoint to monitor their Internet stack.