Articles : Iwan Price-Evans

We often speak of the effect latency has on any network connection and an end user's experience of any application over the internet. But what exactly is latency and why is it such an important factor to consider when planning application infrastructure, including cloud deployment and load balancing?

In a world that is more reliant than ever on global connectivity, it’s increasingly important to understand how data traffic flows between different nodes or is routed between different locations, and how to design a network for resilience, performance, and compliance.  When architecting a network for fast, secure, and resilient application delivery (for example, for a multinational e-commerce website or a streaming media service) one of the most important decisions is whether to put all your infrastructure in one location for simplicity or to build a geographically distributed network.

The software and web industries speak a lot about security and the ability to handle security threats intelligently. In a landscape where security is becoming increasingly complex in nature, it's important that those running websites, applications, and APIs in production have visibility of the threats their organizations are facing and how best to mitigate those threats. Threat intelligence can help achieve this, but how does it work and how should security teams integrate a threat intelligence solution into their toolchain?

Organizations are operating digital infrastructure at a scale never seen before. This scale is producing enormous volumes of threat data from multiple sources, which requires processing across millions of lines of input on a daily basis. Many businesses and security teams are looking to machine learning (ML) to try to make sense of all the data. In particular, if ML technology can help them to identify threats and respond to them faster and more accurately than a team of human experts doing the work manually, it would provide a significant upgrade to cybersecurity.  In this article, we look at the different ways that a machine learning engine, such as the one built into Snapt’s NovaSense threat intelligence platform, can help security teams to make critical decisions.

Tech innovator Snapt helps retailers stay online during the most important sales day of the year by ensuring that websites, applications, and services remain online, secure, and function as fast as possible. San Francisco, Cal. — With the most significant sales of the year happening right after Thanksgiving, Black Friday is the most critical day in the holiday shopping season for retailers. As retail businesses increasingly move focus to online sales, all parts of the sales process must function correctly during the year's biggest sales event—including online offerings. However, Black Fridays past have seen even large retailers like Costco, J.Crew, Walmart, and Lululemon experience issues with their online retail websites, unprepared to meet the surge of online traffic.

In this data-driven world, we capture data for just about everything in our software and hardware. User data, user behaviors, events, data flows, and the inner workings of our servers, virtual machines (VMs), and containers are all recorded. Applications expose ever more data to DevOps and IT teams, to help them make good decisions. However, all of this data is meaningless if users cannot access the data easily, make sense of it, and act on it. This is where observability comes in. 

We talk a lot about the importance of cloud computing and moving infrastructure into the cloud for better performance and availability on a global scale. However, with expectations for application performance continuing to rise and people connecting in more remote places than ever, some businesses need to do more than simply maintain a cloud presence – they need to consider the benefit of setting up a hosted edge environment. A hosted edge can provide a massive reduction in latency, translating to a huge improvement to user experience, more conversions, more revenue, and better customer retention. However, the edge is often harder to secure than a core network, and more variable than the big public clouds. Can businesses enjoy the latency advantage of the edge with application security they can trust?

What's the most shocking thing about Facebook Group's outage, which took Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offline on October 4, 2021? The millions of missed messages? That it took around seven hours to identify and resolve the problem? The estimated $50 billion wiped off Facebook's value? No, the most shocking thing is that it took until now for this to happen.

With climate change and resource shortages increasingly dangerous problems for our planet and society, it's important that we continue to increase efforts to live and work more sustainably. One of the key opportunities we have comes in the form of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) which are at the forefront of our technological innovation. The tech sector can play an important role in driving sustainability by enabling lower energy and resource use.