Why should you care about Internet Resilience?

Every business today relies on the Internet for critical business operations, and IT professionals must ensure Internet Resilience for their company’s customers and workforce. But what does that mean and how can they monitor everything in the digital delivery chain when so much is out of their control? The answer: Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM).

What do you really need to know about Internet Resilience?  

Catchpoint and ITOps Times break down 6 of the most important critical topics you need to understand to ensure Internet Resilience for your business in a bi-weekly microwebinar series, each lasting less than 10 minutes.  

Explore each of the topics in the series:  

1. (This Post) Why should you care about Internet Resilience?  

2. Introducing IPM: How does it help?

3. How can Internet Resilience help eCommerce players drive more revenue?  

4. How can companies improve Network and API performance?  

5. How can companies improve their employees’ digital experience?  

6. How can you improve conversions on your website?  

So, let’s dive into the first topic!

Why should you care about Internet Resilience?

Watch the live Q&A with Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and Co-founder of Catchpoint, or read the video transcript below.

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Video Transcript

Dave Rubinstein

Hey, welcome everyone. I'm Dave Rubinstein, editor in chief of ITOps Times, and this is an ITOps Times Live microwebinar series and we're going to be talking about what you need to know about Internet Resilience. So with me today is Mehdi Daoudi. He is the CEO of Internet Performance Monitoring company, Catchpoint. Mehdi, welcome. Thanks for being here today.

Mehdi Daoudi

Thank you so much for having me, Dave. It's a pleasure to chat with you again.

Dave Rubinstein

Yes, it's been a while since the pandemic but always good to talk to you. So why don't we start with, you know, where the Internet is today? You know how it evolved and how it's different from it was in earlier times.

Mehdi Daoudi

Well, the first thing I would say is it hasn't disappointed us, right? I think we came out of one of the biggest stress testing environments on the Internet with the pandemic. And I'm very happy. I think that it has delivered on its promise of being resilient, of being capable of withstanding an enormous amount of load and when you think about it, we overnight added video conferencing and zooms and this and that on top of it and streaming at all hours of the day.

And so first, a huge congrats to the folks that literally make this happen on a day-to-day basis. The folks that drop cables under the sea; folks that are at the telecom companies that delivered throughout the world an amazing experience, flawlessly, for two or three years. I think we have to give them kudos.

I don't want to start thinking about the Internet as like this commodity, you know, it's like the telephone and you pick up. It's very fragile when you think about it. I mean, we just had a major outage a few days ago in the UK. With the with the major ISP's, there was the outage in Canada a few months ago. So these things are still happening. It's still very fragile but in the grand scheme of things it did OK.

The Internet was evolving, though, when you think about like schooling and doctors and telemedicine. These are things that we're never going to go back to the old days, right? But that requires an Internet that is delivering faster, better, more, even, more resilient, better availability, better reachability.

And we are also seeing the advancements of new technologies like starlink, for example. Amazon is also getting into that business where you we're going to get like literally the Internet beamed on us. And it's amazing where we're going so. No more dead spots on your cell phone because you'll have a starlink, or an Amazon capability where your phone can automatically switch to this satellite Internet kind of thing, so it's amazing. I'm very jealous. I keep getting jealous of what our kids are going to play with in the next 5 to 10 years.

Dave Rubinstein

Wow, that's a lot there. If you're a company that relies on the Internet for your business, it seems like a lot of this stuff is really out of your control. So, how do you deal with outages and things that can affect your business and really cost you a lot of money. What can companies do?

Mehdi Daoudi

Every company relies on something else, whether you're an airline company, you rely on the jet fuel that is delivered to the airport, or if you are the army, when an army goes and does things, the logistics nightmare that it is to feed people, bring food, water, toilets, all that stuff. It's a logistics thing at the end of the day. All these problems are logistical issues.

When it comes to the Internet, you have to treat it as like a commodity or a source of something that can break, and you just need to be ready. You just need to be ready to have a plan in the event that there is a failure: there is a communication plan, there is a backup, there is a list of things you need to do to make sure that you don't let your customers down. Ensure that you respect your customers. You respect their time and give them alternatives if they need an alternative. But it's great.

Dave Rubinstein

Your speaking was breaking up a little bit, and I was wondering if that has to do with the Internet.

Mehdi Daoudi

I don't know. Maybe it's my audio. Let me switch to another system. Can you hear me now?

Dave Rubinstein

Yeah, that's great.

Mehdi Daoudi

You see, it's resilience. I even have two headphones just in case because stuff happens as we say, right? I think it's very important to have a backup plan. I think that's what resilience is. When you think about what the definition of resilience is the ability to deal with the blow, but then come back and bounce back and recover as fast as possible. That's what every business needs to do. And when you think about the companies that did extremely well during the pandemic, for example, are the ones that had the backup plan, the ones that were very agile on their feet. They didn't close their stores. They just did something different online, for example, or different methods, right? So, I think that's what resilience is all about is having being able to deal with issues as quickly as possible.

Dave Rubinstein

Sure, and if you think of the Internet as being more of a utility, you know we have a lot of bad storms here on Long Island and power goes out for days at a time, right? Many people we know have generators, so they'll just plug them right in and keep moving right along. So is part of resilience, let's say, I'm with one cloud provider and one of their areas goes dark, then I have the backup of being able to jump on another?

Mehdi Daoudi

Absolutely, absolutely. You can have different layers of sophistication. For example, your friends might have 1 generator or 15, or they might have solar and a diesel generator. In a digital workspace or in the world we live in with some of our customers, for example, is not relying on a single vendor. You can't have all your eggs in one basket. Having multiple content distribution networks, having multiple cloud providers. But at the same time, those things come at a very high cost, and it's not just the infrastructure cost or paying a bill on AWS or Google or Microsoft Azure. It's also the cost to train your people to operate these three environments, etc. It's not cheap, but if your entire livelihood depends on being up 24/7. Seven days a week. That's the cost of doing business.

Dave Rubinstein

Yep, got that. For sure. That's good. Tell me a little bit about Internet Performance Monitoring and how you guys do that?

Mehdi Daoudi

The reason why all of this is important, and it goes through some of the fundamental beliefs we have as a company that we've had since we started it, is that the customer experience is the product.

At the end of the day, if you have a horrible user experience or customer experience, you will lose customers. That’s a fundamental truth that we can all agree with.

The second thing is, and I'm not talking as a techie here, but if we go back to our marketing mix, there is price, product, promotion, placement, but there’s P – and that's the performance right. So, on top of price, product, place, and promotion, people need to think about performance. That's extremely important.

The other thing is the expectation of people is growing at an exponential rate. I don't know if you can find people that are willing to wait 10 seconds for a website to load or for booking an something online.

We saw the challenge with that with Ticketmaster, right? I mean you don't want to end up on the Senate hearing just because your website is slow and crashing, right? I don't think there is a resilience plan for being humiliated on CSPAN.

The Internet is complex. It's a series of tubes; you and I talked about this many years ago. Those tubes are very fragile and now you're adding like cables under sea that are attacked by sharks. All that kind of stuff.

This complexity is growing at an exponential rate and what we try to do at Catchpoint is help our customers be able to paint a picture of what's going on on the Internet because the Internet is a bunch of things.

It's your DNS providers. It's your content distribution network. It's your cloud providers. When you think at any website today and behind that pretty web page that shows up on your mobile browser or your browser on your desktop, they're probably anywhere between 2 to 1000 requests. There are 2000 things that have to happen in perfect orchestration in milliseconds for that web page to do its job.

And so our job is to help our customers figure out: is their problem on the Internet? If so, where is it? Is it the network issue? Is it the provider issue? Is it the cloud provider issue? Then, they can get back to business and can get resilient as quickly as possible if you know where the problem is.

As you know, dealing with the human body, if you if you have a headache, well, the headache can be caused by a lot of things. You want to narrow it down as quickly as possible so you can administer the medicine as quickly as possible.

So that's what we do with the Internet Performance Monitoring and we cannot, we can no longer ignore the fact that the Internet is where everything is running these days. Take what happened with the pandemic, it has opened the door. I have an 85-year-old dad who orders stuff online who is the guy that couldn't understand computers five years ago, right? Because there is no choice.

Dave Rubinstein

Right, that's true. That's true. All right. Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catch Point, thanks so much for your time today. Great conversation. This is a wonderful way to kick off our six-part series on Internet Resilience folks. If you want to tune in with us again, it'll be April 20th at 1:00 PM we'll be talking with Gerardo Dada, who's the CMO at Catchpoint, talking about introducing IPM and how it can help your organization. Until next time, I'm Dave Rubinstein, editor in chief of ITOps Times. So long for now and thanks Mehdi. Good to talk.

Mehdi Daoudi

Thank you, Sir. Thank you, Sir.