This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase-II project will develop a software-as-a-service product that provides actionable network intelligence to online businesses, enabling them to quickly identify and troubleshoot problems that affect their end users. Studies have shown that a poor end-user experience results in a tangible loss of revenue. Yet, online businesses are dependent not only on their own infrastructure, but on the state of the rest of the Internet as well. From the end user perspective, problems with the network infrastructure, third-party content provider issues, or traffic redirection attacks can result in sites being unavailable or slow. Hence, outside-to-inside monitoring of online services is critical for any Internet business if they wish to remain competitive. Unfortunately, existing products often treat the Internet as a black box. They are unable to capture where things have gone wrong or what could be improved inside the network. In this Phase-II proposal, the company takes a bottom-up approach to capturing end-user experience by focusing on understanding and measuring the components of the Internet infrastructure (such as DNS) that are responsible for data delivery. If this effort is successful, businesses will be able to ensure that their service is globally available, proactively identify performance bottlenecks at the network level, and be alerted immediately when under a traffic redirection attack.
Businesses that operate on the Internet expect data from monitoring services to be actionable. While some products provide actionable information regarding problem components in web pages, The company offers actionable insight into the network infrastructure that drives content delivery to end users. The impact of this technology is two-fold. First, the technology enables customers to improve content delivery to their end users, which leads to increased revenues. Second, the technology can protect businesses from falling prey to traffic redirection attacks, protecting both themselves and their users from financial losses due to fraud. If successfully deployed, the proposed innovation will address an emerging and significant pain point for online merchants and service providers alike.
