This April, NetActuate attended the 43rd United Kingdom Operators Forum held in Manchester, England. The event was filled with network enthusiasts and experts, ready to share trends, best practices, and lessons learned. We went to connect with both current customers as well as other providers and partners we work with across Europe.

The highlight of the event for us was Brett Carr’s presentation discussing Nominet’s partnership with NetActuate to provide fast, reliable DNS resolution for .uk domains. As DNS and Network Engineering Manager of Nominet, Carr discussed the extension of their DNS service to NetActuate’s anycast delivery platform, and how it now enables them to affordably provide reliable, low latency DNS resolution to their end users.

We invite you to watch Carr’s presentation below:

Throughout the day, other network experts gave presentations on a wide range of topics. An early session shared the benefits of automating network audits. New tools can help automate the process of mapping both the hardware and software that make up a network. These automation tools have the potential to make a once-difficult, error-prone and time-consuming task much easier for network administrators.

At NetActuate, we utilize carefully-chosen automation and visualization tools to keep our global network delivering the lowest possible latency to end users across diverse global markets.

The day continued with a discussion by Hurricane Electric on the importance of financially investing in peering relationships to ensure low latency at the edge. Advice on about how to make NOCs more efficient by automating reports and alerts. The attendees also enjoying hearing an update on the availability of 5G networks in England.

After a hot pot lunch (a Northern England tradition), the afternoon sessions included a discussion of how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can simplify the implementation of DNSSEC. DNSSEC increases the security of the typical DNS resolution process by adding an additional verification step before sending back an IP address to the end user. The goal is to make it harder for attackers to exploit DNS vulnerabilities to do things like rerouting Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail to rogue servers, or redirect incoming requests to a fake phishing site. Another afternoon session address the benefits, challenges, and landscape of IPv6 adoption.

At NetActuate, we plan to use much of what we learned to keep our global network, one of the largest IPv4 and IPv6 peered networks in the world, delivering low latency performance to end users around the world.