3 Ways to Improve Your Content Delivery Network

Improve Your Content Delivery Network

Many businesses struggle with last-mile content delivery. It's what separates high-performing brands like Apple from smaller competitors. How do companies overlook this critical step? They put so much time and effort into creating engaging products and services that delivery tends to be an afterthought. Content delivery isn't simply about making sure your organization's KPIs are where they should be. It focuses on the last stage, the crucial point where customers interact with your product or service. Failing to deliver at this stage can impact user experience, website traffic, and conversions — ultimately draining your company's revenue. Content delivery is dependent on latency as applications, videos, and gaming have become more complex and difficult to transmit. Additionally, distance limits the latency of a centralized data center, and businesses can't increase how fast data moves across the network indefinitely. This limitation is why leveraging content delivery networks and edge computing is crucial to increasing network speeds. What strategies can you use to improve content delivery in your organization?

Partnerships, Optimization, and Technology Are Key to Low Latency Delivery

Edge infrastructure is vast and will keep growing for the foreseeable future. And, managing every aspect of edge computing in-house can be inefficient and costly. Business leaders who want their company to thrive need to develop strategic partnerships and optimize their use of edge infrastructure. Here are three ways companies can optimize their content delivery process.

1. Leverage regional CDN infrastructure. As mentioned earlier, latency is a distance problem. Meaning a data center in the US can't provide the same performance to customers in Europe as local servers. This limitation has moved some companies to use a multi-CDN approach, combining various CDN providers on a single network to improve regional performance while keeping data on the same overall network.

In a multi-CDN approach, servers intelligently route traffic based on user location to provide the best experience. While this strategy can improve latency and capacity, it also increases the complexity of your network. Companies using a multi-CDN approach likely need to add APIs, admin tools, and other necessary software.

2. Improve the efficiency of your CDN technology. Many software, monitoring, and infrastructure management tools are designed for content delivery networks, and not all are created equal. Finding ways to optimize your CDN tech stack is a cost-effective way to improve performance.

For example, some teams use containerization to reduce software bloat and the amount of overhead placed on content caches. Additionally, IT teams can quickly create containers to help businesses respond to peak demand. Monitoring tools can also improve efficiency by enabling you to use analytics to choose the right level of computing power for each region.

3. Choose the right edge infrastructure strategy. While latency needs are growing, not all businesses require the same speeds to deliver stellar service. Companies should consider their technology requirements before employing a scattered or consolidated CDN strategy.

A scattered CDN will provide better performance and connectivity, especially in lesser served regions. However, additional infrastructure will increase costs and make it more complex to maintain. For example, companies must consider how they can promptly fix servers located in different regions to keep their network up and running. A consolidated CDN leverages fewer edge points of presence (PoPs) than a scattered network, but its servers have a higher capacity. These edge PoPs can serve larger populations, are easier to maintain, and are more resilient to DDoS attacks. However, they don't provide the same latency as those positioned closer to users and can be harder to deploy because of their complexity. So far, we've seen how working with other CDN providers and improving your tech stack and deployment strategy can improve performance. How can you further optimize your edge strategy to simplify infrastructure management?

Take a Hands-Off Approach to Edge Infrastructure Management

Managing your CDN and edge infrastructure requires the oversight of hardware design, software implementation, and vendor management. These jobs can be overwhelming for businesses that don't specialize in edge computing. Our team can help simplify how you manage edge hardware. We’ll work with your company to understand its technical and physical requirements. From there, we handle everything from edge hardware design and deployment to maintenance and decommissioning. Our full-lifecycle management means you're covered from start to finish. Do you want to take the pain out of moving IT infrastructure to the edge? Contact us today.