Latest news with #InternetResilience
Forbes
04-08-2025
- Business
- Forbes
A Single CDN Isn't A Silver Bullet—It's A Point Of Failure
Mehdi Daoudi is the CEO and cofounder of Catchpoint, the Internet Resilience company. In tech, we love to talk about resilience. We architect for 'five nines,' build across multiple clouds and tout global high availability. But then we quietly route all our critical traffic through one content delivery network (CDN) and call it a day. If your entire digital delivery strategy hinges on a single CDN, you're not building for resilience. You're building for convenience and hoping nothing goes wrong. The Illusion Of Safety CDNs are fantastic! They've enabled us to have fast experiences since the late 1990s. They reduce latency, absorb spikes in traffic and cache content closer to users. But somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking of them as performance accelerators and started treating them like infallible gatekeepers. That's a dangerous shift. Even the best CDNs go down. Outages at major providers have taken down streaming platforms, e-commerce giants and financial services in seconds. Domain name system (DNS) propagation delays, border gateway protocol (BGP) leaks, transport layer security (TLS) misconfigurations—any of these can cascade into hours of downtime. And if you're locked into a single CDN, you have nowhere to go when that happens. The Contradiction Of Multi-Cloud With Only One CDN Enterprises spend millions to go multi-cloud. They distribute compute, storage and databases across AWS, Azure and GCP, often in complex configurations that require deep architectural alignment. But when it comes to the CDN layer—the literal entry point to your app—they often rely on a single vendor. You wouldn't run your back-end on just one availability zone. Why do it at the edge? It's the digital equivalent of putting a state-of-the-art alarm system on your house, then leaving the front door wide open. CDN outages don't just create latency. They can stall transactions, frustrate users and erode brand credibility and trust with your users and buyers. In industries like e-commerce, fintech and media, those impacts have a direct line to the bottom line. Understanding The Single-CDN Risks Organizations that rely on a single CDN often have no fallback when disaster strikes. Looking at the Cloudflare and Google Cloud outage in June 2025, Cloudflare services such as Workers KV, Access, WARP and Workers AI experienced significant disruptions. The impact extended to numerous high-profile platforms, including Spotify, Discord and OpenAI, all of which rely on Google Cloud, Cloudflare or both. This incident highlights the risks of single-CDN architectures. But here's the kicker: many companies not only rely heavily on a single CDN for critical traffic delivery—they also depend on that same provider for performance reporting. It's a bit like having your accountant serve as your bookkeeper, payroll manager and auditor all in one. While convenient, this kind of consolidation can make it harder to maintain independent oversight. Is that really a position of strength? When visibility and accountability are delegated to the very system you rely on, you're not measuring performance—you're just accepting a version of reality that may not serve your users or your business. While users experienced disruptions during the June 2025 outage, Google Cloud's official status page continued to show 'all green' for nearly an hour. For teams depending solely on provider telemetry, this translates to lost time, missed service level agreements (SLAs) and zero actionable insight. The Case For Multi-CDN: Not Just About Outages Going multi-CDN isn't just insurance against failure. It's also about performance, cost and control. • Regional Optimization: Different CDNs perform better in different parts of the world. Consider using the best in each region. • Vendor Leverage: Competition drives cost savings. If one CDN is underperforming or overcharging, you can shift traffic away. • Feature Flexibility: Some CDNs excel at edge compute, others at video delivery or TLS offload. Why limit yourself to one toolbox? A properly implemented multi-CDN architecture gives companies control when it matters most—during change events, rollouts or disasters. While setting up a multi-CDN strategy requires effort, it's not rocket science—and the tools exist. What's missing is the mindset. Too many teams still default to one CDN because it's 'easy' or 'standard.' But in today's hyper-distributed digital economy, that becomes a liability. Think of it this way—you wouldn't put your production database in a single region or run your back-end on a single VM. So why put your user experience in the hands of a single CDN? Building Resilience With A Multi-CDN Strategy To reduce risk, improve performance and take back control, reflect on these key considerations: • Redundancy By Design: Route traffic across multiple CDNs to avoid a single point of failure. Maintain availability even during provider outages. • Intelligent Load Balancing: Use smart routing and failover logic to respond in real time to availability, latency or geographic shifts in demand. • Routine Failover Testing: Simulate outages on a regular basis to ensure both your systems and teams respond effectively when it matters. • Independent Performance Benchmarking: Rely on third-party testing to measure CDN performance. Don't just take your vendor's word for it. • Localized Visibility: Understand performance at a micro-regional level, not just globally. What works in Frankfurt may fall short in Mumbai. • Strategic Optimization, Not Guesswork: Know which CDN is best for edge compute, static delivery or TLS offload and allocate traffic accordingly. Resilience doesn't happen by accident. It's not just about the cloud or the back-end—it's about every part of the stack, including the edge. If your entire architecture depends on one CDN—and you're trusting that same provider to tell you everything's fine—you're not building for resilience. You're hoping for luck. One last piece of advice: If your organization chooses to stick with a single CDN, don't double down on that risk by moving your DNS to the same vendor. When both your content delivery and your traffic control live under the same roof, any failure becomes total, and your ability to recover disappears. Redundancy isn't optional. It's how resilience begins. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Business Wire
24-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
The Internet Resilience Report 2025: 1 in 8 Businesses Now Lose Over $10M a Month to Disruptions and Over Half Lose $1M+
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Catchpoint, the leader in Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), proudly unveils its second annual Internet Resilience Report. This authoritative report provides valuable insights into the critical dimensions of Internet Resilience, offering a roadmap for navigating today's digital minefield. These insights were gathered from 475 global digital leaders, including IT managers, directors, and executive-level decision-makers across diverse industries. Download the 2025 Internet Resilience Report: Now in its second edition, the Internet Resilience Report 2025 continues to serve as an essential resource, providing authentic insights into the evolving importance of Internet performance. The 2025 findings underscore that ensuring fast digital experiences has become just as crucial as uptime—highlighting why digital performance must be a strategic priority at the highest organizational levels. Key findings from the report include: Financial impact intensifies: 51% report monthly losses of over $1 million due to Internet outages or degradations, up from 43% in 2024. And 1 in 8 now lose over $10 million each month, a noticeable rise since last year. AI-driven incidents have immediate impacts: 57% of organizations immediately notice when AI supporting critical applications fails or slows, emphasizing the need for robust AI observability, while a worrying 43% rely on alerts, complaints, or delayed discovery. Slow apps are dead apps: 73% say fast, high-performing websites are critical to business success; 42% claim slow services might as well be offline. Third-party dependencies heighten risks: 74% of respondents identify third-party services as highly critical to their resilience strategy, highlighting the importance of comprehensive external monitoring. Best-of-breed tools dominate: 73% prefer specialized Internet Performance Monitoring tools for safeguarding digital experiences, rather than broad, less targeted tools. Additional key insights include: Defining clear experience standards (XLOs): Despite the AI investment buzz (63%), the report advises prioritizing customer-centric Service Level Objectives (SLOs)—or Experience-Level Objectives (XLOs)—to anchor resilience efforts effectively. Resilience ownership remains unclear: 72% identify CIO/CTOs as ultimately responsible for resilience, yet only 44% directly assign this responsibility to IT operations or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), indicating significant room for improved organizational alignment. Closing critical visibility gaps: 73% utilize IPM specifically to monitor third-party dependencies—services not adequately tracked by traditional APM tools—highlighting critical blind spots that can compromise resilience. "If the Internet was already teetering on a fragile edge when we launched our inaugural Internet Resilience Report in June 2024, it's even more so now," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint. "The industry is waking up to a new reality: slow is the new down. Sluggish websites and applications don't just frustrate users—they drain revenue and damage reputations." Methodology The 2025 Internet Resilience Report is based on responses from 475 digital leaders collected between February and March 2025. Participants spanned North America (65%), Europe (26%), and other regions, representing diverse industries, including tech platforms, financial services, manufacturing, retail, and healthcare. This diversity ensures that the report captures a broad and comprehensive perspective on the state Internet Resilience worldwide. Download the 2025 Internet Resilience Report: About Catchpoint In today's exacting digital age, performance is paramount. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs all rely on Catchpoint to ensure high performance and digital resilience by catching issues across the Internet Stack before they impact their customers, workforce or digital experiences. Catchpoint's Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) suite offers Internet Synthetics, RUM, BGP, Tracing, performance optimization, high-fidelity data, and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics derived from the world's largest, most detailed, active observability network.
