Why IT Pros Must Know the Difference Between the Web and Internet

Think the Internet and the World Wide Web are the same? Not understanding the difference can have a huge impact on the health of your IT operations.

Most companies monitor the Web, but not the Internet. Internet latencies and failures can cause significant revenue loss. This is increasingly important as more companies move applications and assets to the cloud, which they can only connect to through the Internet, not the Web.

Certain cyber-security threats, such as IP hijacking and redirects, happen on the Internet, not the Web. Last year, more than 500,000 domains were affected by unauthorized hijacks and redirects. Monitoring the Web is vital for data security, but a well-developed cyber-security plan needs to monitor the Internet for these types of attacks, including DDoS attacks that take place outside of your firewall. If you’re not monitoring for attacks that affect your IP address, your Internet corporate identity is at risk.

Delivering a service may be identical at the application layer in new markets, but the Internet connectivity may be completely different. It’s essential to understand this and have visibility into Internet performance and Web access in various markets when making investments in content delivery networks (CDNs), cloud service providers and transit companies. There always should be Web and Internet data to back up such investments.

On the Web, applications can be made more robust by housing services on various servers. If one server or server cluster goes down, a backup server can take over. However, if a group of servers connect over the Internet through the same paths and those paths go down, a monitoring system must be in place to identify and mitigate that issue.

CDNs are extremely expensive, and without monitoring and control mechanisms, the inefficiencies are huge. Using tools to monitor CDN usage can allow you to use multiple CDNs and reduce costs significantly by properly managing those contracts. Additionally, organizations need a business continuity plan in place so they can continue operations if their CDNs are affected by significant performance degradations or service failures. The best way to set up such a plan is to monitor and understand the pathways in which these CDNs operate over the Internet.