Companies That Will Benefit From CDNs

A few years ago, content was identified as a strategic marketing approach. Content has been an essential part of business and consumer communications, and, through content, consumers discover, consume, and eventually act on a brand’s message, purpose, and value. Nonetheless, in its development, content is much more than it used to be. Content today isn’t just a part of a brand experience; oftentimes, content IS the experience itself.

As content is gradually turning into a whole new industry, we can see various content providers emerge and gain more and more popularity in the past few years. However, despite the growing number of content providers, content publishing isn’t actually without challenges. Two biggest challenges of publishing content are performance and scalability. Content performance is closely related to latency which is often caused by distance, specifically the distance between users making requests and the servers responding to those requests, and network consistency. Another challenge is keeping the reliability of a website in the case of traffic spikes caused by events like a successful campaign or a viral video. During such moments, relying solely on the origin server is rather unwise as the server may overload and cause an inaccessible website.

A CDN is a solution for these issues. A CDN works by caching content through multiple points of presence (PoPs) which are placed in different locations across the globe. By eliminating the distance between origin servers and end users, a CDN helps content providers maintain the level of quality of their content delivery regardless of the different bandwidth their users are using. A CDN also has a load balancing feature which allows visitors to access content from every server in the network. When the closest server fails, they will be routed to the next closest, preventing overloading and ensuring stability whenever the traffic spikes.

Due to those features, various organizations can benefit from using CDNs. Nonetheless, although almost every business today utilizes content for various business purposes, CDNs are especially targeted for those that operate heavily around content publishing which are specified as follows.

Online Content Providers
Online content providers include a range of categories: user generated content platforms (or typically social networking sites) such as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook; e-commerce platforms such as Tokopedia and Shopee; audio and video streaming services or also knowns as OTT platforms such as Netflix and Spotify; game publishers such as Tencent Games, Nintendo, and Sony Interactive Entertainment; and OTT services providers such as ride sharing apps (Gojek and Grab), digital wallets (OVO, Dana, etc), and online travel booking app (Traveloka, Tiket.com, etc). These platforms handle high-quality content of various formats including HD videos (in the forms of movies, vlogs, webinars, and live streaming videos) which can be challenging to deliver due to their file size. That is why they need CDNs to help them overcome the latency and scalability issues to improve content delivery and website performance.

Internet Service Providers
The term ISP refers to a company that provides access to the Internet to both personal and business customers such as Indihome in Indonesia. By being connected to a CDN service, an ISP will be able to get better access to content from the content providers.

A CDN is a convenient way for content providers and ISPs to be able to provide superior content performance to a large number of geographically dispersed users without needing to upgrade their IT infrastructure. Collaborating with a CDN services provider is becoming an essential move for relevant organizations to ensure their users get the best content consumption experience.