For many, migration to the cloud is a prospect as grim as a sky portending storms.  And yet, businesses big and small are drawn to its undeniable silver linings: flexibility—especially for growing businesses—and cost efficiency. Nevertheless, many companies that rely on cloud services for business remain wary of connectivity and control, and for good reason: the route cloud services are delivered on can significantly affect the quality of a service or application as it is delivered to a customer.

“In large part, what dictates the performance of a cloud site is how customers reach that cloud location across the myriad of choices of cloud infrastructure.”  Mike Kane, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Dyn said in a recent interview with TMC, at Cloud Expo in New York City last week. “If there is a problem on a route, if there is poor performance, it doesn’t matter what I do in tuning my application, adding more storage or adding more processing power. That customer’s experience is going to be not so great.”

The solution, according to Kane lies in what Dyn calls Cloud-based “Internet Performance.” The premise is simple. Think of it in terms of flagging down a taxi in a city you are unfamiliar with. Not only does the driver provide the transportation and delivery, he or she also chooses the route—and it might not necessarily be the best route for where you’re trying to go. More importantly, there might be roadwork, or city events that will affect the time to destination. As we’ve all learned at some point from a morning commute, beefing up the horsepower won’t get you through gridlock any faster—but taking a different route might.

This is where Dyn comes in. Kane explained that Dyn has strategically installed sensors placed all over the world at interexchange points and major transit areas that monitor routes to and from the cloud location. In doing, Dyn can monitor routes much in the same way that a real-time GPS application might provide updates about traffic in busy intersections.    

Based on the information gathered, Dyn can show a number of performance metrics to business clients, and in doing, provide valuable insight that can significantly improve services.

“We give you superior DNS, we give you a way to monitor the network, we give you a way to analyze what that monitoring means and how you can improve, and then we give you a well-received facility to go in and update your tables to keep everything moving in that feedback loop,” Kane said.

And it doesn’t stop there.

“The future is to automate it,” Kane added. “What if that process, all of those things I mentioned, were put into an automated process that you sign up for? . . . So now, any inefficiency, any security risks, any performance degradation gets hit as early as possible and gets mitigated before you even know that it happened.” The solution will be called Real-time Traffic Director, which will automate DNS control plains with Internet Intelligence.

Internet Intelligence from Dyn delivers a level of quality assurance that can provide enterprises with insight into hiccups or changes in their service that ultimately resonate with customers in a negative way. This includes security issues, especially hijacks—according to Kane—which are malicious network redirects that can cause serious data leaks. Any unexpected route switches would be immediately detected, allowing for rapid response time, and prevention of crippling breaches.

In fact, in light of the near-weekly headlines about breaches, it’s surprising that Dyn’s services are not a de facto element of cloud infrastructure yet. That said, as we continue to see companies migrate to the cloud en masse, and as security breaches continue to occur with relative frequency, it’s in the stars—if not the cloud— that Internet Intelligence will become a necessity.

And when that day comes, Dyn will be ready.