Dive Brief:

• Oracle is facing DDoS and internet outages head on with the release of its Internet Intelligence Map website, according to an announcement from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The "self-serve capability" is designed to offer metrics for internet activity and "accountability."

• The website is divided between Country Statistics and Traffic Shifts. Country Statistics display outages reported within the last 48 hours. Outages are defined by BGP routes, traceroutes' response to hosts and DNS "queries" striking servers from the country in view.

• Traffic Shifts help cultivate the analysis of internet blackouts by running traceroutes from international measurement servers. The feature breaks down the type of outage, like clarifying if it's an outage or just a connectivity issue, and notes different transit providers.

Dive Insight:

Whereas Downdetector is known for tracking service outages, Oracle says its map is giving a broader sense of global internet health in its infrastructure.

Last month Oracle announced its "Internet Weather Map," to help guide customers through internet outages due to bad weather conditions. The weather map uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to go through data to create insight into where the internet's "strengths" or "downtime[s]" are during a storm.

However, at the time, the map was "talked about in generalities," and no further details of its capabilities were revealed, Kyle York, VP of product strategy for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and GM of Oracle's Dyn Global Business Unit, told CIO Dive in an interview.

The Intelligence Map is a free tool, open for any internet user, from a chaos engineer to anyone with "geeky" internet curiosities who wants to "triangulate issues" that occur on the internet, said York. Oracle wanted to "productize" a tool for visibility to help reduce the time it takes to respond to a problem, like an attack or outage.

Oracle's map is meant to be another tool within an organization's network or security operations center. There are no APIs, but rather a visualization tool with some capabilities. The internet is becoming an extension of an organization's network, according to York, and such a toolkit can help reduce the "mean time to innocence."

However, maps cannot predict a potential incident and they "don't expose what went wrong," making it difficult to understand the entire story for those who respond to outages, Kolton Andrus, CEO of Gremlin told CIO Dive.

Any type of internet outage, whether due to a bad actor or Mother Nature, can hurt businesses and cost companies about $5,600 per minute, according to Gartner. The key is to keep the internet fast and reliable to maintain its widespread benefits. Studies show faster internet would boost the U.S. overall economy by 0.3%.