Regardless of industry, the modern business world is increasingly distributed, interconnected, service-oriented and complex. Several departments, often led by security and IT, are critical for protecting businesses’ online presence as tech evolves. While enterprises have no choice but to embrace the Internet, its infrastructure was designed a long time ago and many foundational, underpinning systems create major risk for new applications today. Despite a heavy reliance on the Internet, it is far more precarious and complex than many business leaders realize. And unfortunately, examples such as OpenAI's major outage on June 4, 2024 demonstrate exactly how impactful that fragility can be. Amid an increasingly complex Internet Stack and soaring expectations for security and IT departments, evolving technology plays a vital role in not only reducing the burden of monitoring but proactively enhancing performance.

The Internet Stack is the collection of technologies, systems, and services that make possible and impact every digital user experience. This powerful term encompasses the public Internet, their points of interconnection, critical API endpoints, and everything in between. Core Internet systems like DNS, security technologies like SASE, and protocols like TCP/IP, QUIC or BGP are also critical components. With so many components in flux, it’s not a matter of if — but when — the business will face a disruption or full-blown outage, whether from bad actors in a DDoS attack or a simple configuration change gone awry.