Insights into the next generation of management tools

Advances in cloud computing and big data are forcing administrators in the traffic management industry to rethink their approach. Our engineers have compiled a report that offers insight into the next generation of management tools, and a guide to help administrators prepare. A recent report projected the global DDI (DNS, DHCP, and IP address management) market, which includes the traffic management industry, will reach USD $3.27 billion by 2024. Experts attribute the growth to increased migration to cloud-hosted networks and the rapid proliferation of IOT (Internet of Things) devices.

“This is a crucial time for businesses to make the transition to cloud-based traffic management, as global audiences have begun to accept cloud performance metrics as the norm,” explains President of Constellix Steven Job, “We are at a critical ingress point, where organizations need to adopt these new management tactics or be left in the dust.”

IOT

Recent estimates by Gartner claims that over 6.4 billion "things" will be connected to the Internet in 2016, with a whopping 20.8 billion connected by 2020. That means there are 5.5 million new “things” being added to the Internet every single day in 2016!Traditional on-premises networks are crippling under the weight of the new “things”, and have been forced to migrate to the cloud. Cloud-based networks are highly flexible and able the scale with rapid growth, without requiring additional infrastructure.

IPv6

The growth of IOT has also posed additional challenges for IP address management. The traditional IPv4 system, which attributes a 16-character address to every domain name, has reached critical mass. A new system, IPv6, has taken over with:

• Exponentially more possible combinations, more specifically:340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible IPv6 addresses
• Increased security
• Improved routing for multicast networks

While all of these changes have helped administrators improve network and DNS performance, they have also caused additional problems.

“It’s a double-edged sword... you make the Internet faster, open new doors for small businesses, help improve global connectivity, and so much more. But at the same time, you establish a new normal,” says Job.

Affordability

ITO solutions are able to bridge the gap between these rapidly advancing technologies and organizations struggling to meet end-users’ demands. ITO is based on using cloud-based networks and Anycast routing from dozens of points around the world. This approach has made the resources required to maintain these high performance demands significantly more affordable. So affordable, even small businesses can leverage enterprise-quality networks.This was previously considered impossible because high-performance networks and routing technologies require massive amounts of infrastructure and maintenance. Only a select few organizations are able to support these on their own. Now a small mom and pop business can harness the performance and scalability of an enterprise network, for a small business price. For an even more in-depth look at how ITO is helping small businesses, check out this article.

Monitoring

Traditional network monitoring tools are not meeting the needs of today's cloud-based networks. The second half of the ITO approach strives to combat this with integrated monitoring and automated routing techniques.With the recent surge in outages among service providers, clients are increasingly cautious. ITO solutions use monitoring checks to monitor service providers and ensure SLAs (Service Level Agreement) are being strictly adhered to.Next generation platforms, like Constellix, are taking monitoring to the next level, by integrating these checks with routing configurations. Users can configure automated redirects based on the health status of different checks. These platforms are able to bypass problem nodes and even entire regions so that end-users have the best possible connection.

Intelligent Routing

And now clients are able to use artificial intelligence to automate their query routing based on performance metrics. Monitoring nodes can detect dozens of different factors specific to each end-user to troubleshoot connectivity issues, and then automatically reroute them for optimal performance. This technology is fueled by the power of big data analytics, which is used to influence automated routing decisions.