For most enterprises, how their users access applications and data is an essential part of doing business, and how they service those application and data responses has a direct correlation to revenue generation.   

According to We Are Social’s Digital 2023 Global Overview Report, there are 5.19 billion people around the world using the internet in 2023. There’s an imperative need for businesses to trust their networks to deliver meaningful content to address customer needs. 

So how responsive is the application and data that’s required for decision-making being rendered?

When there are unexpected incidents impacting geographical regions, how can you mitigate outages that impact access to applications and data? In short, how does your organization present the best possible user experience for your customers all the time? 

It turns out, the answer may rely not just on how many servers you stand up, how much failover you put in place or how fast your internet connections are. In fact, today it’s advanced DNS that can make a difference.

Since the dawn of the internet, we have seen that DNS continues to serve an important role in how we transact through applications and data to deliver a fast and reliable user experience that customers depend upon. Today’s advanced DNS services make dynamic decisions about where to send an internet request based on availability, performance, time-of-day and many other calculations

With enterprises requiring highly distributed applications and data to derive quicker insights, hybrid cloud and multicloud infrastructure is an obvious reality. Network providers can be the lever businesses use to deliver exceptional experiences to users.

Networks need to be resilient because consumers like you and I expect them to be. Consumers are rarely concerned about how workloads are balanced, whether a cloud service is deprecated for maintenance, or whether certain device connections are performing better at a particular moment. All they want is to access applications and data readily to gain insights.

NS1 and IBM: Driving enterprise connectivity

For over a decade, NS1 (now an IBM Company) has been supporting the world of apps and website experiences through sophisticated, authoritative DNS. Some of the biggest brands in the world (brands IBM works with every day) utilize NS1 for vital connections to their customers.

Our platform is designed to take our clients’ complex and distributed networking environments and make their applications and data highly available—a necessity as organizations innovate to deliver business-critical solutions to their customers. So, independent of where your customer traffic originates around the world—whether it’s Boston, San Paulo, Tokyo, Nairobi or Paris—the DNS answer for where to route that traffic may be different and may vary depending on which content delivery network (CDN) is busy right now, how much you’re paying for transit and what level of traffic balance you’re trying to achieve.

What makes NS1, an IBM Company, intriguing is the way the platform operates. Specifically, how our platform is engineered to optimize internet traffic flow for reliability, performance and cost, no matter where the traffic originates.

NS1 continues to help deliver results for some of the world’s biggest applications with the ability to manage, analyze and steer traffic fluidly.

Critically (and unlike some bundled DNS services), our platform is agnostic when working with cloud providers and content delivery networks (CDNs). This not only leads to easy integrations but also enables a multi-vendor approach where businesses can leverage the “best-of-breed” solutions based on current measurements of the user experience.

We believe that’s a significant advantage over other providers, and with NS1’s traffic-steering capabilities, customers may enjoy a highly customizable range of options to steer traffic and fit a wide variety of use cases.

Introducing IBM NS1 Connect

Since IBM’s acquisition of NS1, we’ve been eager to showcase how premium DNS can be a lever of innovation in today’s networks. We’re excited to call this innovative solution IBM NS1 Connect.

When launched on October 17, 2023, IBM NS1 Connect will leverage the power of DNS to deliver fast, reliable connectivity for applications and websites across the globe. For our clients, that means a customer experience that can drive revenue, lower customer churn and improve the agility of network teams.

This translates into some surveyed customers having a higher rate of satisfaction than their previous DNS setup when working with our platform and the ability to agilely deploy connectivity, regardless of how distributed the environment of an application. (Based on NPS scores collected by NS1 from a small select group of customers from June 1-September 19, 2023.)

While NS1 will continue to sell its solutions, IBM’s DNS offerings are expected to have a baseline set of features: a global network, a 100% uptime service level agreement, protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and support for DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). Customers can also easily route DNS traffic across our 26 points of presence (PoPs) to help keep users connected.

IBM NS1 Connect is designed to deliver top-tier response and propagation times, an API-first infrastructure to support automation and a sophisticated traffic-steering option. Because most companies we see are now API-first, our platform allows customers to automate processes through the user interface.

The location of where your customers and your application workloads are should no longer feel like putting together an obscure puzzle, but instead a lever for innovation.

Building a network for the future

This is just the beginning of an exciting new phase within IBM’s portfolio of networking offerings. IBM NS1 Connect is our strategic entry point to another upcoming opportunity—internal network connectivity through IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh. Together, these two products are expected to offer enormous value to customers by creating an end-to-end solution for application connectivity.

Networks play a key role within an organization’s success, and as the workloads these networks operate on become more complex, solutions like IBM NS1 Connect can help organizations modernize their infrastructure to better connect customers around the world.

IBM’s plans, directions and intentions may change or be withdrawn at any time at IBM’s discretion, without notice. Information about potential future products and improvements is provided to give a general idea of IBM’s goals and objectives and should not be used in making a purchase decision. IBM is not obligated to provide any materials, code or functionality based on this information. This statement replaces all prior statements on this topic.