Mehdi Daoudi, CEO And Co-founder Of Catchpoint, On Digital Resilience By Design

Mehdi Daoudi: Internet resilience, or digital resilience, is the ability to deliver uninterrupted, high-quality digital experiences even when things go wrong to maintain availability, performance, reachability, and reliability. It focuses on the technical robustness of the Internet stack—networks, protocols, hardware, and connectivity—and the ability to quickly recover and minimize the impact of disruptions.
 
These days, customers don’t differentiate between your brand and your digital performance. If you’re down, they’re gone. And our Internet Resilience report recently verified this notion, revealing that 1 in 8 businesses are now losing over $10 million a month to internet disruptions in 2025, and over half are losing over $1 million a month. These are not small numbers that point toward the fact that Internet resilience is now foundational for all businesses.
 

Mehdi Daoudi: The biggest shift is the increased reliance on the internet stack – protocols, connectivity, cloud services, and systems that are a mix of internal and external, with different degrees of control - a mesh of SaaS tools, third-party APIs, CDNs, ISPs, cloud providers. And they are all stitched together across continents. That complexity demands a totally different monitoring approach. You have to monitor from the outside in, across every dependency, and have visibility into the real-world experience delivered to your users.
 

Mehdi Daoudi: Traditional APM data will show you infrastructure and code/centric metrics, performance and events, but without context, it’s like saying your heart rate is 140 without knowing whether you’re lounging at the beach or running a marathon. When observability teams combine APM data with user experience and internet-centric contextual data, such as response time, ISP latency, API performance, and cloud services uptime, they have the visibility needed to understand incidents, pinpoint root cause, and fix issues quickly.  When they monitor these metrics proactively, they can reduce mean time to resolution, prevent future issues, and minimize the impact of incidents on the business.
 

Mehdi Daoudi: Start by shifting your KPIs. What are the top goals for your operations team, uptime? Code efficiency? Modern IT organizations think less about infrastructure SLAs and more about business metrics that are driven by customer experience. The right KPIs are XLOs, eXperience Level Objectives that measure the way a system is meeting the expectations of the user – and the business.
 
Of course, system-level metrics are still important, as they cost, efficiency and are drivers of customer experience. However, it is important to remind us that the role of IT is not to keep servers and apps running, but to keep the business running by allowing customers, partners, and the digital workforce to be productive.
 

Mehdi Daoudi: Each layer matters, but the biggest, most overlooked gains often come from the internet layer. Think of it like air travel. You might have the most efficient plane (application layer) and the best boarding process (user layer), but if the air traffic control system (internet) is jammed, you’re still grounded.
 
Application monitoring and on-premises device-centric (SNMP) network monitoring have been around for decades, and their use is well understood. Fewer organizations have the awareness or the expertise for optimizing internet performance IPM tools.

Observability at the internet layer, across DNS, BGP, ISP, cloud services, APIs, SD-WAN, EDGE, IoT, and other internet technologies, is where many companies discover hidden bottlenecks or vulnerabilities that impact performance, which is why they are incredibly important to monitor.
 

Mehdi Daoudi: This convergence is inevitable and also essential. AI is evolving the technology for anomaly detection, root cause identification, providing context to incidents and recommending fixes. Once we build trust in these systems, they will be able to apply fixes automatically.
 
One curious example is traffic steering at scale, which enables organizations to automatically steer traffic across a pool of CDNs by geography to optimize for performance, availability, and cost based on real/world user experience metrics.
 
The most advanced observability teams will feed infrastructure, APM, and IPM data into intelligent systems to make increasingly more useful, more accurate diagnostics, recommendations, and actions.
 

Mehdi Daoudi: It starts with transparency and trust. An important consideration is to build a blameless culture that eliminates silos and enables the team to find issues and opportunities to optimize without impacting their egos or their political capital.

Focusing on user experience metrics, such as XLOs, is very powerful not only to align technical teams, but also business and technical teams. When people understand the “why” behind the work, they take ownership, and that’s when continuous improvement becomes cultural, not just procedural.

Organizations that make digital resilience and user experience their number one objective have the potential to find great success.