Cloud vs. CDNs: Exploring the Best of Both Worlds

With most industry talk today leading toward “the cloud,” the topic of content delivery networks (CDNs) has taken a back seat for many IT departments – yet in a growing number of cases, businesses are leveraging the benefits of both solutions.

F5 defines a CDNs as “an infrastructure that helps organizations deliver static Web content, rich digital media, and everything in between, to employees, vendors, partners, and customers worldwide, in the fastest amount of time at the lowest possible cost.”

While cloud services offer IT departments many compelling benefits, including increased flexibility in application testing and deployment, lower costs and on-demand scalability/provisioning, many are choosing a hybrid solution that includes both cloud and CDN solutions.

In fact, CDNs raised contract revenue 18.3 percent in 2012, to $2.28 billion, as value-added services (site/app acceleration, cloud solutions, analytics, specialized HTTP video platforms, content transformation, workflow, management, security and rights protection) in addition to core bandwidth provisioning supporting very large video accounts, fueled market growth, according to recent research from AccuStream.

The company that created the CDN space in the late 1990s has taken steps that clearly define the evolution of the larger market segment far beyond connected servers for handling rich media with yesterday’s introduction of Integrated Advertising Services – addressing the revenue side of online video, according to TechZone360’s Bob Wallace.

Akamai and others including Level 3 Communications, Limelight Networks and Mirror Image Internet, have long since advanced beyond the CDN silo by adding increasingly advanced and powerful services to their portfolios to address the core challenges encountered by customers with their online video ventures.

In an upcoming webcast, Internap will compare and contrast cloud solutions and CDNs, explore the future relationship between the two and examine real-world use cases in which these technologies effectively work together. 

The webcast, which is entitled, “Cloud: CDN Killer?” will be held on March 7 at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. To register, click here. All webcast attendees will receive complimentary copies of our CDN Buyer’s Guide and Cloud Hosting Buyer’s Guide.