How Umbrella’s global network puts you in the fast lane

It’s early Monday morning and you’re running late. You need to get to the office for an important meeting, but traffic is worse than usual. You check for alternate routes, but realize lots of other cars are doing just that, causing slowdowns at each turn. What if you had a way to take the fastest route, and it was reserved just for you to get wherever you need to be?

The Cisco Umbrella global network does just this for the network. With datacenters all around the world, we process over 150 billion DNS requests per day from millions of users just like you. We peer with the top internet service providers (ISPs) and content delivery networks (CDNs) to shorten the routes between every network in the world and our datacenters. As one of the fastest DNS resolvers in the word, Umbrella not only adds security, but it also makes your internet access even faster.

How does it work?

The Umbrella global network features 30 geographically distributed datacenters serving 90 million active users daily in every country in the world — and has 100% business uptime since its inception in 2006. How is that possible? Umbrella was the first network security service in the market to use anycast routing. Remember that dedicated reroute to get you out of traffic? With anycast, every datacenter announces the same IP address, so requests are transparently sent to the closest available location and you’re not stuck waiting. And, if for some reason a datacenter is down due to a natural disaster, equipment failure, or maintenance, all requests are automatically re-routed to the next closest location. THAT’S IT!

This means we’re able to provide you with one of the fastest and most reliable DNS resolution services in the world, while delivering security and policy enforcement. And you experience no additional latency or the challenges of failover configuration.

Our global footprint and the power of a self-healing network

We’re strategically growing our datacenter locations around the world to continue to enhance our network performance. The Umbrella global network utilizes both edge and core datacenters. Our edge datacenters are used for processing traffic and serving DNS requests from end users. Our core datacenters are primarily used for storing logs and reporting.

We have 30 edge datacenters around the world and are continuing to grow; in the past year, we’ve added 5 new datacenter locations in Mumbai, Dubai, Sao Paulo, Melbourne, Dublin, and Milan to better serve a growing number of customers in these regions, reduce latency, and mitigate the potential impact of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

In addition to our global footprint, the way our global network is built further differentiates us from other leading cloud-delivered security services. We’ve built a self-healing network to provide you with the most reliable DNS service possible. By self-healing, we mean we’ve designed against the failure of nearly every aspect of our system and are able to withstand tremendous disruption to our infrastructure, without causing disruption for our customers. We use multiple Internet Service Providers at every site and peer with local networks via Internet Exchanges wherever possible to ensure full redundancy of our Internet bandwidth. In fact, we have over 4,000 peering sessions with more than 800 ISPs and CDNs globally. We also connect to regional networks at every site to help geographically isolate traffic so that an issue in one region doesn’t spillover and impact another. All of this bandwidth then feeds into a large cluster of servers at each site that is constantly balancing the load across itself.

Our global footprint combined with our operational excellence offers unparalleled reliability and performance. We’re also fully transparent; our network status and a rolling 30-day view of operational messages and notices is shared in real-time online at https://status.umbrella.com, so you’ll always have the latest and most transparent service status.

You don’t need to be stuck in a traffic jam of security solutions that slow you down. If you’re ready to learn more about Umbrella and how you can gain faster internet along with protection against threats, sign up for a free trial today.

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