Azure DNS vs Quad9 comparison

Why

In a 24/7 world, customers demand applications, websites, and content that load instantly and are always on. When those connections are unreliable or slow, businesses don’t meet customer expectations, causing customers to leave. When that occurs, revenue may suffer.

What

IBM NS1 Connect delivers the high-performance, reliable, secure network connectivity that businesses need to meet increasingly sophisticated customer expectations. Leveraging a global network with a 100% uptime SLA, IBM has the capacity and scale to meet the needs of any business. IBM NS1 Connect takes performance to the next level, powering the sophisticated needs of enterprises with complex network infrastructures.

How

IBM NS1 Connect provides network connectivity solutions that give networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect also enables IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

Details

IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service that provides authoritative, premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience. Revenue-generating applications require authoritative DNS resolution to keep critical applications and websites online. Unless your DNS infrastructure is always-on and resilient, network reliability and user experience will suffer, your network reliability may suffer, resulting in poor user experiences if revenue-generating critical applications and websites are not online. IBM NS1 Connect’s always-on, API-first architecture provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world with premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering. It also enables your IT teams to efficiently monitor networks, deploy changes and conduct routine maintenance.

IBM NS1 Connect uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to ensure that websites and applications are:

• Online, all the time: Global network with 100% uptime SLA and DDoS protection
• Fast: Top tier response and propagation times, custom traffic steering to optimize connections
• Cheaper to run: Far less expensive than self-hosting
• Automation friendly: API-first platform with Ansible/Terraform integrations and support for Pliant rapid network automation
• Easier to troubleshoot: Unique DNS data insights offering

Designed for enterprises looking to optimize their DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service delivering authoritative DNS and advanced traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience and provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world. NS1 Connect streamlines DNS management by automating both simple and complex DNS configuration tasks via API and preconfigured integrations, so you can spend more time on higher-value work.

IBM NS1 Connect is delivered through our unified delivery platform. The cloud-based platform gives networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect solutions also enable IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

For enterprises looking to further optimize DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect offers rich DNS data analytics to streamline the identification of the root cause of anomalies within traffic.

IBM NS1 Connect Features

• Global anycast DNS network: Enjoy fast connections to consumers around the globe through an anycast network with 26 points of presence (PoPs).
• 100% uptime SLA on DNS resolution: Maximize uptime and revenue generation with resilient, always-on, authoritative DNS.
• API-first architecture: Integrate and automate workflows with NS1 Connect's well-documented API; every line of code starts as an API call, all functionality is available through the API.
• Real-time user monitoring (RUM)-based traffic steering: Uses real-time intelligence on network performance and availability to direct DNS connections to the best available application resource; the widest range of filter options and data sources in the industry, not data that is extrapolated from sampling; the most flexible, granular controls for your network.
  
• Built-in resilience: Add a single-tenant, redundant DNS layer and manage it from a single control plane as your primary DNS.
• Managed DNS for China: Improve performance for the Chinese mainland by segmenting traffic with NS1 Connect’s Managed DNS for China.
• DNS insights: Get a better understanding of DNS traffic patterns by mining your DNS data to identify security issues, misconfigurations and performance issues.
• DDoS protection: Cap your query-based spending with protection against unexpected surges in traffic from distributed denial-of-service attacks.
• Uptime monitor: Quickly identify issues and automatically adjust DNS traffic steering configurations with native health check alerts.
• DevOps tool integrations: Preconfigured integrations with leading DevOps tools including Ansible and Terraform to help automate routine maintenance, manage data sources and feeds.
• Propagation speed: fastest propagation in the industry, measured in seconds not minutes; worldwide propagation in under five seconds.
  
• Independence: neutral arbiter between infrastructure services (CDNs, clouds).
  

IBM NS1 Connect helps enterprises modernize and optimize networking infrastructure to provide customers with faster connections to websites, applications, services and content.

Quad9 is a free, recursive DNS service that replaces your ISP's or company's default domain name server (DNS) settings. Quad9 blocks lookups of malicious host names from an up-to-date list of threats when your computer makes any internet transaction that uses the DNS.

This blocking action protects your computer, mobile device, or IoT systems against a variety of risks, including malware, phishing, spyware, C2 command-and-control domains, exploit kit-compromised sites, and botnets. It can also boost performance while ensuring privacy.

Quad9’s service uses threat intelligence from a variety of sources, including:

• Cisco
• F-Secure
• Netlab
• IBM X-Force
• Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG)

Quad9 employs DNSSEC, which assures that the results supplied are accurate. It also filters out websites that have been categorized as hazardous using blacklists provided by various security suppliers.

Quad9 supports DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH). It’s been increasingly obvious in recent years that standard DNS has significant security flaws due to a lack of encryption. As a result, it is more susceptible to DNS hijacking. Quad9 users are effectively protected from cyber criminals as well as government censorship.

The Quad9 service is run by the Quad9 Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Switzerland whose purpose is to make the internet a safer and more reliable place for everyone.

Quad9 Features

Quad9 has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Privacy: Quad9 is the custodian of a worldwide DNS infrastructure that allows people to communicate and participate in governance and civil society more easily. Quad9 protects their users' privacy by not collecting personal data; Quad9 protects their consumers' privacy by preventing connections between their devices and harmful Internet sites. Quad9 provides users with performance by placing servers in hundreds of communities all over the world to deliver service on a local level. Because of their non-commercial position, they are able to give equal emphasis to regions that are otherwise underserved.

• Addresses: Quad9 offers a number of distinct recursive DNS service options. Each has its own IP address (or, in certain situations, hostname), which you may use to configure your devices.

• Threat blocking: Both commercial and publically available threat intelligence feeds have been merged by Quad9. Each was picked based on its shown ability to identify threats and provide a comprehensive set of capabilities for detecting exploits, malware, ransomware, spyware, and other potentially hazardous websites. Quad9’s threat intelligence (TI) partners provide us with data on feeds that are rapidly updated and dispersed as new domain-based risks emerge, and these domains or hosts are updated in their lists.

• Locations: Quad9 systems are available in more than 150 places in 90 countries, with significant expansion planned. Quad9's servers are primarily positioned at internet exchange points, which are the locations with the highest concentration of interconnections within a typical network region.