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It may seem strange for a business to hope you've never heard of it.

But that's exactly what content delivery network (CDN) providers would like.

"If most people don't know that we're there, then we're delivering a great quality of service," Raymond Maisano,the local head of Cloudflare, a CDN and cyber securityprovider, tells The Business..

"Hopefullythey don't get to see how we deliver the service for us, that's a great result."

Every minute, Australians are accessing websites and apps operatedacross the world, without a second thought.

CDNs are one part of the system allowing that to happen. They speed up the experience for users, and are largely invisible until something goes wrong.

Outages are an unfortunate fact of online life, but when an outage takes down some of the most high-profile websites on the internet, it becomes big news.

In June, sites including The New York Times, The Guardian, Twitch, Reddit and the British government's homepage went down due to an outage at CDN provider Fastly.

Fastly said it was an "undiscovered software bug" triggered by a configuration change, and said 95 per cent of its network was operating as normal within 49 minutes.

Less than a fortnight later, several Australianbanks,Virgin Australiaand even the Reserve Bank of Australia were hit bya technical glitch at another provider, Akamai.

Akamai said it was caused by an outage in one of its distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection services, used by around 500 customers.

ABC News: Stephanie Chalmers

So while CDNs are constantly operating behind the scenes, it's only when they encounter an issue that the average person will start hearing about them.

The services CDNs provide essentially sit between a company's platform and the web page the user is looking at.

Paul Haskell-Dowland, the associatedean of computing and security at Edith Cowan University, uses the BBC website as an example.

"You might think that the BBC servers are likely to be, perhaps, in London in the UK, and so your traffic the request for the page and the page content hasto move from your computer here in Australia, all the way across the internetto London that's quite a big journey."

ABC News: Rachel Pupazzoni

Whileinternet speeds are dramatically faster than they used to be, multiplythat request by thousands of people trying to access the same page at the same time, maybe add in some video content, and things can slow down.

That's where CDNs come in. They provide a copy of the content theuser is trying to access, but in closer proximity.

To understand what happened, you need to know what a CDN is, and how crucial they are to the smooth running of the internet.

"Instead of going all the way to the UK on a server somewhere closer to where the consumer resides, we will have a copy of all of that content," Dr Haskell-Dowland says.

"You're actually downloading a copy from your nearest data centre, which could be in Perth, it could be in Sydney, or somewhere that's more geographically convenient."

This makes the process of accessing web content quicker and more efficient, and also means that if one data centre becomes overloaded, another can pick up the traffic.

The fact that the physical locationmattersmight come as a surprisein an era where we're used to hearing everything's kept in "the cloud".

But Macquarie Telecom Group chief executive David Tudehope says clouds need a physical home, too.

"Data lives in clouds. Clouds live in data centres," he explains.

ABC News: John Gunn

Similar networks of data centres are used to provide cyber security services.

For example, adistributed denial of service or DDoS attack involves thousands or even millions of computers attacking a website or system, to overwhelm it so it can't cope with any more traffic.

"One of the largest collections of systems that we saw in recent history had over 10 million devices corralled into this single network that could be used to attack devices," DrHaskell-Dowland says.

To counteract such attacks, cyber security providers use their network of data centres to move traffic around when it comes in in large volumes.

DrHaskell-Dowland explains that it involves "having lots of destinations that can handle the requests, effectively scaling up to deal with the attack providing the capability to deal with a large influx of traffic, which most small organisations simply can't cope with".

It's not just big businesses using CDNs, cyber security services or cloud computing systems and storage.

Small business are increasingly using websites and apps to interact withcustomers, particularly as the pandemic forces some to operate solely online during lockdowns.

"There's a push for digitisation for small businessand for them to be more successful in the digital space, and with that comes a higher risk," Council of Small Business Organisations Australia (COSBOA) chief executive Alexi Boyd says.

ABC News: John Gunn

To mitigate the increased risks, businesses are signing up to cloud storage and cyber security services.

But Macquarie Telecom's Mr Tudehope, whose business operates five data centres in Australia, with another in development, sayssmall businessesneed to be mindful of just ticking the box for default settings.

"When they click on the accept button for a cloud provider, where is that data being kept?" he asks.

"[If]they keep their data offshore, even if it wasn't a conscious choice, that data is now subject to the foreign laws of that country.

"It's subject to a foreign regulator, it'ssubject to foreign courts, none of which they realised when they clicked the 'I accept' button."

"COSBOA works with governmentand online services like Google, like Dropbox, like OneDrive to make it easy for small businesses to make sure that they can be protected, thatthe appropriate software is continually updated, that they know where their data is being stored," Ms Boyd says.

A global coalition says China's hacking campaigns must stop, but pointing the finger over January's Microsoft Exchange attack seems the only consequence for now.

The stakes are also high in terms of reputation.

While occasional outages might cause problems to major bank customers, for example, it may take prolonged inconvenience to prompt some people to switch banks, whereas less established businesses may risk losing customers if their services are unavailable.

And Ms Boyd says small operators are particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks and hacking attempts, as cyber criminals may see them as a way into bigger businesses, which have more sophisticated protections.

"They can be targeted because of who their clients are, or the way that they interact with big business," she says.

Given how widespread the impact ofoutages can be whether they're caused by technical issues as in the recent Fastly and Akamai cases, or by a cyber attack preventing them is a priority.

Cloudflare'sRaymond Maisano says CDN providers want to avoid having a "single point of failure" that can take services offline.

"Which is why we have so many points of presence around the world, so if something does happen, that we're able to pick up that volume or that load from one of our other points of presence," he says.

Cloudflare is also connected to theinternet archive, to access a past copy of a customer'swebsite and display that to users (instead of an error message) until a problem is resolved.

"For many customers, the brand is so important," MrMaisano says.

ABC News: Michael Barnett

For companies using the services, preventing outages might mean having more than one service provider, so that if one goes down, another can step in.

"In both of the recent outages, it only affected that individual provider, so hadthose companies been able to shift their content to a different CDN, or indeed had a backup process, then it would have been more likely that we wouldn't have seen the kind of widespread outage that we did," Dr Haskell-Dowland says.

"If you choose just one network, you're even more exposed," MrTudehope agrees.

"Whether it's your content delivery network or your telecom provideror your cloud provider, you've always got to think about having redundancy, having backups."

The frequency of attacks and the size of ransoms being demanded increasessignificantly over the past year.

However, that obviously comes at an additional cost, and last year a report from the Australian Cyber Security Centre found that nearly half of small businesses couldn't, or wouldn't, spend more than $500 a year on IT security.

While outages make headlines around the world, it's worth remembering that on the days we don't hear anything about CDNs and cyber security providers, they're most likely performing as they are designed, says DrHaskell-Dowland improvingbrowsing speeds andreliability.

"Thankfully, they don't happen very often," he says of outages.

"These platforms are inherently very reliable, theyrely upon a distributed network of devices that are delivering content in large, well-resourced data centres. So we hope, in the future, we won't see many of these instances."

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Content delivery networks hope you've never heard of them but if there's an outage, it's big news - ABC News