David Coffey, Chief Product Officer, NS1, an IBM Company, outlines some of the key technologies he thinks provide the perfect foundation for a unified tech stack.
Corporate IT departments have found themselves out of the loop when it comes to maintaining control of their company’s tech stack. The rapid march towards digitalisation, the need for agile and robust infrastructure to underpin remote and hybrid work practices and the ever-increasing demand for performance in every aspect of consumers’ online lives has brought about a shift in how technology has been specified and integrated.
The urgent need to respond to the changes wrought by the pandemic meant individual lines of business took it upon themselves to purchase new technology solutions. This not only changed the well-honed practice of streamlining all tech purchases through corporate IT but also meant companies were left with disjointed tech stacks. Where the corporate IT team might have selected Microsoft Azure across the entire business, they may now find themselves with one line using a cloud service from AWS instead.
Apart from creating multiple security challenges, these actions are also unnecessarily costly for companies, which is why CTOs, CFOs and CISOs are now encouraging their IT teams to seize back control of the tech stack.
Putting right the disjointed decision-making of recent years, however, is not without its challenges. No company wants to put at risk the ability of its application teams to provide high-performing solutions to customers because it needs to unify its systems. The answer to the conundrum must come without compromising the applications on which its business thrives and ensuring application teams can work unimpeded.
There are two ways of looking at this for IT leaders. The first is through the lens of the business and its ability to remain profitable and meet the expectations of shareholders. The second is from the perspective of the application team and ensuring they can access tools to operate applications securely. This is no less important given that without the right systems in place, there is likely to be an effect on performance leading to lower transaction rates and a loss in user confidence.
Scrambling to meet disparate employees’ needs during the pandemic was a unique situation, but corporate IT teams now need to put in place a unified tech stack that works for all lines of business and offers a fast ROI. A good place to start is with a few key technologies that are likely to be at the top of the application team’s most wanted list.
Multi-CDN
Dependent upon to provide high-quality, reliable services to users globally, content delivery networks (CDNs) are not all equal and it is advisable to have access to a network of CDNs to optimise performance for users. While one CDN may be ideal for static asset hosting, another will excel at delivering video streaming. Those that are located regionally can often provide a superior service to local users, but combining global and regional CDNs is an ideal solution for maintaining strong performance across all regions. Having access to multiple CDNs in the event of an outage gives application teams options and allows applications to stay available.
Multi-cloud
The use of multiple clouds is a sound and popular approach and often recommended as the bedrock of resilient applications. While for some companies using different clouds is an evolution they didn’t plan in a cohesive way, multi-cloud usage does offer significant advantages. As we see regularly in the news some of the world’s largest cloud providers suffer outages and if a company is reliant on a single provider this will instantly make an application unavailable. Resilience comes through using the services of multiple cloud providers, which provides backup infrastructure when it is needed and allows companies to select the most cost-effective and dependable provider in each location.
Intelligent traffic steering
Internet application traffic moves fast. This makes it almost impossible for network engineers to manually respond quickly enough to ensure consistency of service. Instead, what is needed is technology dedicated to traffic steering. This enables application teams to adapt to real-time conditions without there being any impact on the user experience in the event of an outage. Smart traffic steering uses various criteria to quickly reroute traffic whether that is the user’s location or the capacity of the server.
Resilient DNS
DNS is the key driver behind the control of app traffic and as a result it is a common target for cybercriminals looking for a way through apps’ defences. Resilient DNS and DDoS protection, therefore, are essential. A secondary DNS network separate from the primary network delivers this level of resilience providing an alternative if the primary network goes offline. Other technologies that could be considered for the stack are anycast routing, which can easily direct traffic to available servers if there is a partial outage and DNSSEC to guard against man-in-the-middle attacks.
Network automation
They’ve been calling 2023 the year of efficiency. The four technologies listed above are increasingly crucial to reaching the best application and network performance, but networks need to be efficient on top of it all. It’s surprising how much of network tasks and operations continue to be written down on paper or in static spreadsheets. Anything from routine tasks to traffic steering are available for some sort of automation. The great thing about network automation tools is that they can start small with one use case, but the impact can be felt immediately. Think about what’s taking the most time and energy and start there. Examples could include proactively automating incidents, assuring an always-on performance (like traffic steering) or simply doing a task quicker. All of these things can help manage costs and make your system more efficient.
This list of five technologies should be regarded as a foundation for a unified tech stack. What matters most as corporate IT leaders regain control of the technology in their companies is to keep an open dialogue with the application team so their objectives can be met. Not only will this improve the integration of technologies, it will also cut costs and boost reliability, paving the way for the next stage in their company’s ongoing Digital Transformation.
