Safer Together: Equinix and F5 DNS
There are many tropes in film and television. We're aware of them, even if we don't implicitly recognize them. A common set of tropes revolves around the hero of a story. There are accidental heroes, chaste heroes, unlikely heroes, broken heroes, tragic heroes, and even an amnesiac hero. A less common hero trope is the humble hero. This hero is often the protagonist, but sometimes they are the sidekick.
Consider Lord of the Rings. Not the individual stories, but the entire epic adventure. Frodo is the main character, our hero on a journey to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom. At his side is Samwise Gamgee. Humble, optimistic, loyal Sam. Both characters develop through the telling of the tale, but Sam's growth into a stalwart, humble hero is often overlooked.
No one will be surprised when I draw a parallel between Sam and DNS. See, without DNS (Sam), Frodo would never have made it to Mount Doom.
Alright, that might be stretching the analogy just a bit. But if Mount Doom were a domain name, it'd be spot on.
Of all the infrastructure services required to operate a digital business, there really is none more critical than DNS. Without DNS, applications aren't findable. Without DNS, digital experiences aren't available. Without DNS, it can be argued, there is no digital business.
Consider that in 2020, 82% of respondents to the IDC 2020 Global DNS Threat Report suffered application downtime due to a DNS attack. And not just applications on-premises, but applications in the cloud, too.
One of the reasons for the ongoing attacks against DNS is that it is, by necessity and design, an open service. To protect it—and the digital business it ultimately enables—requires not just the ability to fend off a growing list of attack types, but to strategically consider where it ought to be deployed and how it should be connected.
By deploying on the Equinix PlatformTM, DNS services will have access to the widest possible ecosystem. By leveraging those DNS services with Equinix Fabric’s private virtual interconnection solution, DNS services will have fast, direct access to every major public cloud provider and network as well as a broad range of service providers and enterprises. By leveraging private interconnection, Equinix can ensure close proximity and fast access to the applications organizations increasingly rely on to conduct digital business, connect with family and coworkers, and educate our children.
Employing F5 DNS on the Equinix Platform with the Equinix Fabric not only ensures fast access to those applications but protects them from potentially disruptive attacks. F5 DNS can detect and prevent a broad set of attacks that attempt to disrupt communication, misdirect consumers, and deny access to applications hosted in the cloud and on-premises. Fully achieving availability requires monitoring DNS infrastructure as well as application health and policy-based scaling. F5 DNS distributes requests for DNS and applications based on a variety of metrics including cloud performance, user location, and application performance.
F5 DNS also supports business continuity with the ability to move responsibility for answering DNS queries to alternate instances in the same data center or in another region, thereby foiling attempts to disrupt business by overwhelming critical infrastructure. By leveraging the robust presence of Equinix Fabric and F5 DNS across the globe, business can be confident in its ability to withstand the attacks occurring with alarming frequency.
DNS infrastructure is truly a humble hero of digital business, operating beneath the notice of consumers without complaint to make sure applications remain fast, secure, and available.
There are more benefits to employing F5 solutions in the Equinix environment. If you missed them the first time, here are more resources you can check out to learn more: