A Day in the Life of Steven Job

Running a business is more than a full-time job. With a name like Steven Job, busy is practically his middle name. Job is the President (COO) of Tiggee LLC, which is the parent company of DNS Made Easy and Constellix. 

In providing Domain Name System (DNS) management services, Tiggee subsidiary companies are responsible for keeping websites online and maintaining record-speeds for all of their customers’ domains. End users around the world rely on Job’s companies’  DNS services to reach websites. 

Without DNS services, the internet as we know it, could not work. You could not sit at a computer and enter a website name and see it pull up on the screen in front of you. It would simply not work that way. You would have to remember IP addresses for all of the websites that you want to visit, in order to access them. That’s a lot of numbers. DNS is a giant phone book that not only stores all of these IP addresses and website names, it also does the work in retrieving the queried website for you. 

It may sound easy, but trust me, there is a lot that goes on in the background. 

Life Before COVID - Job’s Daily Walk

Before the coronavirus pandemic, a normal workday for Job consisted of:

• Waking up and spending time with his three sons before work, getting them ready for school, and seeing them to their designated bus stops
• A morning workout
• A developer meeting from home, to accommodate for different time zones in the team
• Once in the office, he was holding back-to-back meetings between the various departments 
• Weekly office lunches for continued employee training
• Meetings with engineers to make sure that existing systems and new projects are running smoothly
• Assist with customer demos
• Facilitate company-wide collaboration
• Once out of the office, he was onto activities for his children which were usually sports-related
• Continuing to work at home and tying up loose ends to wrap up his workday
• Relaxing with his family

Just like everyone else, again even with a name like Steven Job, and aside from the fact that our daily tasks differ, he had a normal routine - until it wasn’t. 

Pandemic DNS Industry Statistics

The pandemic had a direct impact on the DNS industry. Due to mandatory stay-at-home orders, sharp increases in internet usage were reported for DNS Made Easy and Constellix users alone, showing record-breaking domain usage for those they serve. 

Some of the reported increases were:

• Online retail industry up 57% 
• SaaS (software as a service) domains up 54%
• News outlets up 42%
• Social media outlets up 42%
• Streaming services up 42%

It was also imperative to secure networks to support virtual learning, which also showed escalated data usage of 47% - not to mention heightened preparation for a successful 2020 holiday shopping season. 

Resilience is Key

To support the surge in traffic, the need for secured DNS resilience was elevated to ensure the world stayed connected. Job took this feat on as his personal mission to create a sense of normalcy for customers and end users alike, during a very trying and difficult time.  

Increased outages and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were anticipated. A lack of redundancy or improperly managed DNS are recipes for disaster. Increased traffic leads to an overwhelmed site, leaving it unreachable to end users. Aside from attacks, with many visitors attempting to reach online resources at the same time, there are numerous assets that need to load and render properly. This is dependent on a website’s performance and availability. As internet needs rose, so did the need for stable environments for a variety of platforms and that is where Job’s companies shine. 

DDoS Attacks On the Rise

Job recognized this drastic influx in traffic would lead to a rise in DDoS attacks. The need to inform customers about the importance of DNS reliability during an unprecedented time should be at the forefront of this transition to a more online approach. He led his teams in leveraging technology to facilitate more online collaborations for businesses, e-commerce, universities, entertainment, and more. 

The company experienced its largest DDoS attack in September of 2020. The network and team were able to thwart this attempt without affecting the day-to-day activities of its customers and end-users.  Many of the company's clients experienced more DDoS attacks than ever before, but due to Tiggee's advanced machine-learning technology, clients were not affected. 

Fully-Remote Work Transition

Since the nature of Job’s business is centered around online technology, the team’s transition to fully work from home was successful. In fact, the full transition was completed in 24 hours. The focus was now placed on a more connected, online environment through various communication options, such as Slack and Google Workspace. Full-team meetings allow the ability for the entire Tiggee team to reach out to each other for anything they may need and serves as a time to learn about updates and projects in the works from each department.

This shift afforded the opportunity to look into hiring more remote staff and maintain it as a permanent structure at Tiggee LLC. The ability to bring in employees on a global scale allows him to create an elite team that is dedicated to customer service and success.

It was important to Job to ensure that the transition was smooth for everyone and that included his customers too. Connecting with users and building connections by paying attention to their needs has led to a successful virtual experience for their consumers. 

In order to maintain domain resilience and top speeds during the pandemic and beyond, Job and his team successfully deployed two new Points of Presence (PoPs), extending their services to South Africa and Mumbai, India. A new DNS monitoring node was established in Seoul, South Korea to support DNS Made Easy and Constellix’s Sonar monitoring system adding real-time analytics as an extra layer of security to this new area. 

Looking Ahead Post Covid

For Job’s new daily walk, he tries to keep a pep in his step. He has come up with a viable routine that works for him and the company. In addition to new online communication methods, he has adjusted to maintain a workout schedule either as soon as he wakes up or right before bed. He made adjustments in his work times to accommodate the shifts in times of his sons’ activities. 

One major challenge during Covid has been detaching from work because working remotely lends itself to round-the-clock availability. When working in an office environment, there is a natural detachment from duties when leaving the office. Since the entire organization is now remote, it’s a matter of fighting against the guilt of walking away from tasks to deal with normal occurrences in the home and simply knowing when to call it a day. 

His most important philosophy is to make more of an effort to take care of yourself, whether it is getting into an exercise routine, mentally detaching from work, allowing yourself breaks–whatever it takes. Just make that effort. Your mind will thank you for it and you will perform at a higher level in all you do. This is all part of the Jobanism approach in combating security threats and uncertainty in the industry. 

During a time in which outages seemed unavoidable, Job proved that they are and kept domains up and running through one of the world’s most difficult times.