A decade ago, NS1 was founded in a bid to help organizations optimize the most critical part of network traffic steering with domain name systems (DNS).

Over the past 10 years, NS1 raised money, expanded its suite of services and, oh yeah, it got acquired by none other than Big Blue, IBM, in February of this year. As part of IBM, NS1 is now reflecting on its journey and laying out a course for the road ahead as the challenges of network traffic steering continue to be issues for organizations around the world.

Sometimes when a smaller company is acquired by a larger one, things change with the culture of the small company, but that's not the case at NS1. Alex Vayl, NS1 cofounder and chief of staff, told SDxCentral that from his perspective after the acquisition, the day-to-day at NS1 has remained mostly the same and that's a good thing.

"For the past decade we've worked really hard to cultivate a great internal culture and deliver products that make our customers' lives better," Vayl said. "IBM has made it very clear that they don't want to disrupt any of that and see us as a complementary part of their technology suite.”

Vayl added that most importantly, the team is the same. He noted that customers can expect to speak with the same people when they pick up the phone to call for support. That said, NS1 now has the backing of IBM's massive global footprint and resources. Over time, he expects this will translate to a better managed DNS solution with new features and a more performant network.

"On the flip side, IBM customers will get more exposure to NS1 as our solutions become more closely integrated," Vayl said. "Without giving too much away, this will unlock some really interesting capabilities for existing and new IBM customers."

There are two big challenges that really stand out to Vayl from NS1's decade in business.

The first is everything that goes into starting a business and getting things going. Vayle said that for himself and his cofounders, NS1 was their first startup.

The second big challenge was in late 2016, when the entire DNS industry was victim to several DDoS attacks — some of the largest in history.

"NS1 and our competitors were constantly being targeted and it was definitely an all-hands-on-deck situation," he said. "We managed to get through it, but some of our competitors did not come out unscathed and several parts of the internet saw significant outages."

DNS is a foundational element of the internet itself.

Vayl explained that the underlying purpose of DNS today is the same as it was when first proposed in the 1980s: translate human-readable domain names to IP addresses or other lower-level service information.

While the purpose of DNS has not changed, what did change is how businesses build their networks. Vayl commented that gone are the days when an organization would host a website or application in a single data center. In the modern era, infrastructure has become much more distributed. Additionally, performance and uptime are no longer “nice-to-haves,” they now actually directly impact a company's bottom line.

"We built NS1 from the ground up to meet the needs of modern, globally distributed web applications," Vayl said.

Examples cited by Vayl of how NS1 does that is with its Filter Chain and Data Feed technologies. Vayl explained that those technologies enable organizations to easily build custom algorithms to direct traffic based on a combination of metrics, including system health, geography, network location, system load and more.

While it's not clear what the next decade will bring to NS1, Vayl said that the near-term initiative is to bring NS1's secret sauce into the enterprise use cases that IBM serves today.

"Unlocking those capabilities and integrating more closely with IBM's existing solution set is a great first step for the next decade," he said.