The top five benefits of a smart CDN

Introduction

In the late 1990s, CDNs began to be widely used to speed up static content delivery, such as HTML pages and images. CDNs significantly improved page load times by replicating this content on multiple servers worldwide and delivering it from the server closest to the user. Today, they are an essential part of how the Internet works, ensuring that billions of users can access the content they need when they need it.

While traditional CDNs have proved effective, they also have significant limitations. Enter the smart CDN—modern CDNs that help organizations deliver their content securely in the fastest time possible. With programmable edge computing capabilities that allow organizations to quickly enable new and innovative CDN use cases at the edge, APIs, and self-service capabilities, CDNs are a powerful means to simplify configuration and content management.

There are several ways a smart CDN can help you achieve your content delivery goals and exceed the expectations of your audience. Let's take a look at five such ways.

Help deliver personalized customer experiences

Smart CDNs can help businesses meet high expectations for personalized experiences by providing tools and methods for flexible programming at the edge. With smart CDNs, organizations can tailor content based on user type, device type, and location, serving more personalized, dynamic content. As a result, smart CDNs can help set the stage for a far more optimized user experience, leading to increased engagement and conversions. By delivering the right content to the right user at the right time, businesses can create a truly personalized experience that meets and exceeds customer expectations. With smart CDNs, enterprises can flexibly program content delivery to support this vision, making it a reality.

Plan ahead for traffic spikes

As any business owner knows, managing traffic spikes can be a challenge. Unexpected web or application traffic surges can lead to downtime, poor performance, and unhappy customers. A smart CDN can help businesses manage traffic spikes by automatically adapting to changing conditions and providing the power and scalability needed to keep websites and applications up and running even during peak periods. By being prepared for traffic spikes, businesses can avoid the negative consequences of downtime and deliver a better user experience.

Secure website and applications

By utilizing a smart CDN, businesses can ensure that their websites and applications are faster and more reliable and that their digital experience is uninterrupted and safe. A smart CDN provides integrated security controls that help sustain uptime and performance even in the face of DDoS attacks. Additionally, the Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects customer information, while the support for DRM and content tokenization helps protect an organization's proprietary content. A smart CDN can also help manage the bad bot menace, a growing concern for all businesses.

Enable real-time visibility and control

Smart CDNs offer real-time visibility and control to help organizations identify performance issues, which can be critical when seconds or even milliseconds mean the difference between satisfied customers and lost sales. Smart CDNs have web interfaces and dashboards that offer control over the CDN and access to real-time historical data. This data can include requests per second, cache hit ratio, bandwidth utilization, origin latency, miss time, and errors. The data from these dashboards allows enterprises to see patterns and trends in their content consumption. This understanding enables them to make decisions that lead to better business outcomes.

Enable instant delivery of content

A smart CDN is a modern, intelligent system that prioritizes end-user experience and content delivery. It's architected for today's web with strategically placed high-density Points of Presence (POPs) to deliver high-quality content to end consumers instantaneously without loss in quality. A smart CDN ensures optimal viewing on all devices by providing different video bitrates and serving images in the proper dimensions and formats depending upon connection speed. Hence, users always have an enjoyable experience regardless of their browser type.

Are you interested in learning more about smart CDNs? Get started by downloading our whitepaper - The Ultimate Guide to Smart CDNs.