Oracle recently made its Internet Intelligence Map available to provide users with a simple, graphical way to track the health of the internet and gain insight into the impact of events such as natural disasters or state-imposed interruptions. The map is part of Oracle’s Internet Intelligence initiative, which provides insight and analysis on the state of global internet infrastructure.
“The internet is the backbone of modern business, but it has changed a lot over the last ten years; as more workloads move to the cloud, business infrastructure is growing in scale, complexity and volatility,” says Niral Patel, Managing Director and Technology Leader, Oracle South Africa. “Add to this the Internet of Things (IoT), where connected devices now outnumber humans, and you’ll understand why today’s IT leaders including DevOps, administrators and architects have to closely monitor the internet if they are to build and deploy the next generation of cloud. They will need to understand the volatility of the internet, in terms of availability, performance and security, if they are to provide a high quality service to users, and avoid leaving their company exposed.”
Oracle’s Internet Intelligence Map provides users with a free simple, graphical way to track the health of the internet and gain insight into the impact of events such as outages, natural disasters or state-imposed interruptions. The map is part of Oracle’s Internet Intelligence initiative, which provides insight and analysis on the state of global internet infrastructure.
Patel points out that South Africa’s broadband internet is delivered via several undersea cables, such as Seacom on Africa’s eastern coastline, the Eastern African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) linking South Africa with Kenya and Sudan, and the West Africa Cable System (WACS) spanning the west coast of Africa.
“Subsea cable outages occur from time to time, which means South African internet users can experience higher latencies with a degradation of service. Although traffic can in most cases be routed via another cable system, a repair vessel needs to be mobilised and it can take a couple of days for it to reach the fault location, with weather and sea conditions impacting the time it takes for the fault to be repaired.
“Volatility is the internet’s biggest challenge. We forget about the risk and vulnerabilities of infrastructure itself – the actual infrastructure we rely on to run our businesses. If your business relies on internet connectivity to ensure delivery of your services, understanding the health of the internet is very important.”
He has a clear warning for local businesses to be vigilant not only for local conditions, but global events too: “Many businesses don’t realise quite how reliant they are in today’s cloud era. They need better visibility into the health of the global internet so that they can understand how external events prevent them from reaching web-based applications and services. It is only when you have this insight that you can work around those issues to improve availability and performance and deliver a better experience for customers.”
For more than a decade, members of Oracle’s Internet Intelligence team have broken some of the biggest stories about the internet. From BGP hijacks to submarine cable breaks, Oracle’s Internet Intelligence team frequently publishes objective data and analysis that informs public understanding of the technical underpinnings of the internet and its effects on topics like geopolitics and e-commerce. With today’s news, Oracle is now making core analytic capabilities available to everyone via the Internet Intelligence Map. Using one of the world’s most comprehensive internet performance data sets and backed by years of research and analytics, Oracle has developed the premier resource and authority for reliable information on the functioning of the internet.
“The internet is the world’s most important network, yet it is incredibly volatile. Disruptions on the internet can affect companies, governments, and network operators in profound ways,” says Kyle York, vice president of product strategy for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the general manager for Oracle’s Dyn Global Business Unit. “As a result, all of these stakeholders need better visibility into the health of the global internet. With this offering, we are delivering on our commitment to making it a better, more stable experience for all who rely on it.”
The Internet Intelligence Map presents country-level connectivity statistics based on traceroutes, BGP, and DNS query volumes on a single dashboard. By presenting these three dimensions of internet connectivity side-by-side, users can investigate the impact of an issue on internet connectivity worldwide.
“It’s important to have a global view of the internet in order to understand how external events prevent users from reaching your web-based applications and services. It is only when you have this insight that you can work around those issues to improve availability and performance,” says Jim Davis, Founder and Principal Analyst of Edge Research Group.
The Internet Intelligence Map is just one of many advanced awareness and visibility tools that help Oracle improve the experience of the cloud by making it better and more reliable every day. This offering is powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which offers a set of core infrastructure services to provide customers the ability to run any workload in the cloud. Only Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides the compute, storage, networking, and edge services necessary to deliver the end-to-end performance required of today’s modern enterprise.