Can you be incompetent and still stay in business? Not as far as your web infrastructure is concerned. All the studies show that when a website is unavailable, or even just slow to load, customers go elsewhere—and often they don’t come back. After all, if you can’t keep a website up and running, why should people trust you to deliver any other product or service? So it’s worth asking: how reliable is your website relative to the top brands in your industry?

We will always remember April 2020 as the month that a DDoS attack took the world’s most expensive bottle of whiskey offline. We barely knew ye. Dateline: April 2020, the world’s most expensive whiskey auction is taken offline by DDoS. But other notable outages taught us a lot about which threats dominate our landscape. Namely DDoS attacks, which are highlighting vulnerabilities organizations have with redundancy and threat mitigation.

One of the central questions we ponder in our work is: what does uptime mean in an interconnected world? You can do everything to ensure 100% reliability, yet still fail. How is this possible in an interconnected world? Shouldn’t there be enough redundancy to ensure nothing breaks if you don’t actively break it? That’s another way of saying technology is great when it works.