A string of community outages within the first half of 2024 from main corporations underscores the essential position of the IT community in our always-on digital world. These disruptions, impacting tens of millions of customers, spotlight the significance of guaranteeing community infrastructure efficiency and resilience. Community complexity mixed with growing demand and chronic cyber threats name for a brand new method that delivers the scalability, flexibility, safety, and ease of use wanted to make sure constant efficiency and shield towards disruptions.
Particular particulars concerning the causes of those outages are being investigated, however one factor is obvious: community disruptions are on the rise and will be brought on by a mess of things, so it is advisable to be ready for something. Disruption causes can vary from {hardware} failures and software program glitches to cyberattacks and even human community configuration errors.
The current outages increase a essential query for all organizations, particularly giant enterprises with world footprints and tens of millions of consumers: Is our community geared up to deal with the ever-evolving calls for of right now’s digital panorama? If the reply to that query is “no” or “I’m undecided,” you’ll have a major problem in your fingers.
Modernization is important
The excellent news is that developments in community expertise supply options. Modernized networks, leveraging the facility of clever automation, supply the agility and resilience wanted for right now’s world. Listed here are some finest practices for IT operations administration (ITOM) that may assist cut back the danger of community outages. By implementing these practices, organizations may’ve probably prevented or lessened the impression of the numerous outages we noticed within the first half of this 12 months.
Testing and Validation: On February 22, a significant mobile community supplier in america skilled a widespread community outage, impacting tens of millions of consumers throughout the nation for roughly 12 hours. The corporate attributed the difficulty to an error throughout a community enlargement challenge. With out full information of the corporate’s particular community setting, we do know that automated testing and validation are key to minimizing the danger of these kind of errors. This contains pre-change lab-based testing, pre-checks, and submit checks to make sure an optimum community state earlier than and after modifications are made. Whereas it is unimaginable to say definitively if these methods would have prevented this particular outage totally, they definitely may reduce the impression and assist organizations in an identical state of affairs restore service extra shortly.
Configuration Administration: In early March, a technical subject prompted widespread outages for a significant social media platform, impacting roughly half one million customers globally for over two hours. In keeping with ThousandEyes, the outage was doubtless brought on by a backend service equivalent to authentication. Outages like this usually stem from software program bugs or configuration errors launched throughout updates or upkeep. Conventional troubleshooting strategies will be time-consuming, resulting in delays in resolving the difficulty and prolonged downtime for customers. By automating configuration administration, customers can completely vet new updates and configurations earlier than they grow to be public. This will help catch and repair bugs a lot sooner, probably stopping outages totally. Rollback and preview capabilities present further measures to keep away from main outages. Moreover, steady integration and steady supply (CI/CD) practices can streamline the deployment of bug fixes as soon as they’ve handed testing. This helps resolve outages shortly and minimizes person disruption.
Community Monitoring: On March 6, a short disruption left many customers unable to entry one other social media platform. Based mostly on early analyses, a problem with the platform’s backend system – doubtless the servers storing person information and posts – prevented it from responding to requests from the sting community, leading to a short lived outage for customers. Modernized networks usually have subtle monitoring instruments that may detect points like these early on. Combining monitoring with auto-remediation capabilities permits for faster decision of issues earlier than they considerably impression customers. Moreover, networks with clever options can reroute site visitors or change to backup methods instantaneously, minimizing general downtime.
Community Visibility: On March 15, a significant outage crippled a fast-food restaurant chain’s operations worldwide for a number of hours, impacting tens of millions of consumers throughout quite a few nations. The outage was brought on by a minor configuration change by a third-party vendor, highlighting the complexity and elevated vulnerability of interconnected expertise methods. With higher visibility into the complete expertise stack, together with what third-party distributors are doing, enterprises can higher determine potential issues earlier than they trigger outages. To additional strengthen their defenses, enterprises can implement redundancy and diversification, making their networks much less prone to outages brought on by single factors of failure.
Steps to community modernization
To take this additional, beneath are key steps all enterprises can take to modernize their networks and cut back the danger of expensive outages:
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Set up proactive responses: Arrange methods to answer monitoring and alerting circumstances. Embody periodic and triggered configuration audits, configuration and state drift detection, and proactive troubleshooting procedures to pinpoint community points.
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Allow self-healing mechanisms: Make the most of expertise, equivalent to community automation with auto-remediation, to implement functionalities that repair widespread community issues like configuration errors, restarting failed units, and rerouting site visitors.
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Implement standardization with configuration administration: Implement a system to implement customary configurations, monitor modifications, and allow rollbacks to known-good states.
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Combine steady testing: Incorporate automated testing and validation, together with pre-change lab-based testing, pre-checks, and post-checks to make sure optimum community state all through modifications.
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Preserve clear documentation and visualization: Replace community documentation, system inventories, and topology maps repeatedly. This minimizes guide errors and accelerates troubleshooting.
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Streamline safety posture with enforcement: Implement safety coverage configuration routinely to attenuate threats and the probability of security-related outages. Be certain that patching and OS upgrades are present to cut back exposures.
The community outages from the primary half of the 12 months function a wake-up name for organizations of all sizes. Not can companies cross their fingers and hope for his or her networks to get the job performed. They must be proactive about managing their networks and battle-testing them for right now’s unpredictable panorama. By embracing community modernization finest practices, companies can construct extra agility and resilience into their current infrastructure. This minimizes downtime and mitigates the impression of outages, and it additionally ensures a smoother and extra dependable expertise for customers and staff alike. Investing in community modernization is not a luxurious; it is a enterprise crucial for thriving in right now’s ever-connected digital panorama.