Beyond Uptime: A Guide to Measuring and Improving Internet Resilience
In our hyper-connected world, the internet is more than a convenience; it’s the critical infrastructure that powers our economy, communication, and daily lives. When it goes down, the impact is immediate and widespread. But simply asking “Is the internet up?” is no longer enough. The real question we need to ask is: How resilient is it?
Internet resilience is the ability of the global internet to withstand and recover from disruptions, ensuring it remains a reliable and available resource for everyone. This goes far beyond simple uptime metrics. It involves a complex interplay of security, infrastructure, and market dynamics. To truly understand and enhance the strength of our digital world, we need a clear framework for measuring it.
Why Internet Resilience Matters More Than Ever
A resilient internet is fundamental to modern society. It ensures that essential services like healthcare, finance, and government can continue to function during a crisis. For businesses, it means continuity of operations and protection against costly downtime. For individuals, it guarantees access to information, communication with loved ones, and participation in the digital economy. As our reliance on digital connectivity grows, building a more robust and resilient internet is not just a technical goal—it’s a global imperative.
A Comprehensive Framework: The Four Pillars of Internet Resilience
To effectively measure and improve internet resilience, we can assess it across four key pillars. This holistic approach provides a complete picture of the health and strength of the internet ecosystem.
1. Security: The Digital Shield
The security pillar focuses on the internet’s ability to defend against malicious attacks and disruptions. A secure network is one that can maintain its integrity and availability even when under threat. Key areas of focus include:
- Protecting Against Major Threats: This involves deploying measures to thwart common but powerful attacks. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm services with traffic, and BGP hijacking, which maliciously reroutes internet traffic, are prime examples of threats that a secure internet must withstand.
- Adopting Security Protocols: Widespread adoption of crucial security standards is a powerful indicator of resilience. Technologies like DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) help prevent DNS spoofing and ensure users are connecting to legitimate websites, while initiatives like MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security) help reduce the most common routing threats.
2. Stability: The Foundation of Connectivity
This pillar examines the reliability and health of the internet’s core operating systems. Even without a malicious attack, instability in these fundamental systems can lead to widespread outages. The two most critical components are:
- The Domain Name System (DNS): Often called the “phonebook of the internet,” the DNS translates human-readable domain names (like
example.com) into machine-readable IP addresses. A stable and secure DNS infrastructure is essential for virtually all internet activity. - The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP): BGP is the routing protocol that directs traffic between the major networks that make up the internet. Instability or misconfigurations in BGP can cause massive service disruptions, effectively making large parts of the internet unreachable.
3. Market Environment: The Power of Diversity
A resilient internet cannot be a fragile monoculture. The market environment pillar measures the diversity and competitiveness of the providers that form the internet’s backbone. A lack of competition can lead to single points of failure.
- Preventing Single Points of Failure: When a single Internet Service Provider (ISP) or transit provider dominates a region, any technical issue or failure on their network can take an entire country or area offline. A diverse and competitive marketplace encourages redundancy and provides alternative pathways for traffic, making the overall system much stronger.
- Encouraging Innovation and Investment: Competition drives providers to invest in newer, more robust technologies and to offer better service level agreements, all of which contribute to a more resilient ecosystem.
4. Infrastructure: The Physical and Digital Backbone
This pillar assesses the tangible components of the internet—the physical and digital systems that carry data across the globe. It’s about the quality, diversity, and robustness of the underlying hardware and connections.
- Diverse Physical Pathways: The internet relies on a vast network of terrestrial and submarine fiber optic cables. Resilience depends on having multiple, geographically separate cable routes, so that a single cable cut from a ship’s anchor or natural disaster doesn’t sever a region’s connection.
- Robust Interconnection Points: Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are critical facilities where different networks connect and exchange traffic directly. A healthy distribution of IXPs within a country improves performance and provides crucial redundancy, keeping local traffic local and reducing dependence on international links.
- Modern Access Technology: The availability of modern, high-speed access technologies like fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and advanced mobile networks (5G) provides end-users with more reliable and higher-capacity connections.
How We Can All Contribute to a More Resilient Internet
Building a stronger digital future is a shared responsibility. By understanding these four pillars, we can all take actionable steps.
For Businesses and Network Operators:
- Implement BGP security measures like Route Origin Validation (ROV) by following MANRS guidelines.
- Deploy DNSSEC on all your domains to protect your customers and your brand.
- Diversify your network providers and cloud services to avoid reliance on a single vendor.
- Invest in robust DDoS mitigation services to protect your online assets.
For Individuals:
- Secure your personal devices by keeping software updated and using antivirus protection. This helps prevent your devices from being used in botnets for DDoS attacks.
- Use a reputable DNS resolver that supports security features like DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH).
- Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on all your important accounts to add a critical layer of security.
By adopting a comprehensive framework that looks beyond simple connectivity, we can make smarter investments, develop better policies, and build an internet that is truly resilient—one that is ready to withstand the challenges of tomorrow.
Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-framework-for-measuring-internet-resilience/
