Diversification and why it’s critical to content providers

Diversification is a risk management strategy that combats the concentration of all resources in one single pot or asset class.  

In this blog post, we discuss the importance of diversification for IT directors at content providers in the digital era. They are challenged to always keep their services available and providing content, so need to avoid having all their services grouped at one single provider to ensure high availability. The analogy would be putting all your eggs in one basket, risky isn’t it? 

The performance and availability of CDNs 

Content delivery networks (or CDNs) offer a reliable content distribution system for websites and applications. These systems work to speed up content delivery (webpages, video, games, downloadable objects, streamable media, and even software updates) to web users based on their geographic location and performance. 

Over the past few weeks, there’s been an unprecedented number of companies questioning the performance and availability of CDNs. This is following recent events where CDNs have impacted the availability of a large number of websites. 

It was discovered that a root cause of these CDN issues was the fact that many of these companies who lost availability were using a single pure-play CDN (where you have a single provider using their own infrastructure). These are traditionally designed as hardware-based, with PoPs deployed in geographical locations based on the provider’s preference, often based upon the most economical option and thus, not necessarily the best performing option. And although the single CDNs are marketed and perceived as providing speed, security, and high availability, no single CDN provider could possibly offer the best performance everywhere in the world at every point in time.   

Improving redundancy with a Multi-CDN 

In contrast to single CDNs, Multi-CDN solutions are deployed as an overlay of individual CDNs, creating a combination of various PoPs from different CDN providers. This solution typically offers more PoPs spanning a much larger geographical area, and also gives optimal performance and virtually infinite scale, all across the globe.  

We’ve witnessed the uptake of Multi-CDN solutions over the last few years amongst large content owners/providers, deploying these solutions to improve the end-user experience and delivery. Nowadays, this solution is getting as much traction with smaller content/providers owners, or in fact every CDN user. 

There are different ways to run a Multi-CDN switching platform, and the way to do it is really dependent on the traffic type and use case. Leaseweb uses an optimized strategy that leverages performance metrics in the decision-making process by deploying the SynEdge Multi-CDN platform. This means that the CDN chosen is the “best” performing CDN, which has received the highest score across the board. Our evaluation is based on new QoE metrics based on the specific region, for the specific piece of content, considering the ISP and device of the end-user intending to access the content. 

Feeding the content consumer 3.0 

A Multi-CDN should be considered as a solution to tackle the following critical aspects: service availability, scalability, avoiding a single point of failure. A major bonus is this comes as one solution that is managed by one provider, and they remove the stress of managing multiple CDN providers at the same time. 

With the uncontrollable spread of mobile and connected devices, media consumption is at its height and showing no signs of slowing down. Consumers expect flawless and real-time services, with no interruptions. To quote our previous blog post, “we now live in a hyper-connected world with expectations of 100% uptime, at all times.”  

Technology leaders are being pushed to rethink their infrastructure to make it more agile and scalableso they will be able to respond appropriately to the content consumer 3.0. This sounds like a call of duty for content providers to adapt to the new digital era! 

Co-written by Stéphane Ngali, Sales Account Manager, Leaseweb and Wilfried Dudink, Managing Director, Leaseweb CDN

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