Oct
6
2009

What CDN can mean for your Business

There’s an old axiom that essentially states, that our computing power doubles every couple of years. Not surprisingly, we manage to utilize that capacity about as quickly. In our post-Web 2.0 environment, with broadband network connectivity and terabyte sized disk drives becoming ubiquitous, we’re moving around more data faster than ever before. The promise of a rich media Web has been realized, and it isn’t only media companies that are distributing large amounts of data. Multimedia audio and video are certainly popular, but there are a myriad of other types of downloads that we perform regularly- software and application updates, manuals and PDF collateral, image libraries, games, articles, and more. Regardless of the core nature of your business, if you have a Web presence, the chances are good that you are distributing a significant amount of digital content. If you are, you could benefit from CDN services.

A CDN (Content Distribution Network) works under a simple but effective premise, tried and true by its retail distribution cousin- speed up deliveries by putting products, or in our this case digital content, closer to customers. Amazon is a textbook example of how this works, no pun intended. From their humble beginnings in Seattle, Amazon now has distribution centers around the globe, stocking popular items and allowing for fast deliver to shoppers. This not only increases customer satisfaction, but over time it provides a notable savings in fulfillment costs.

Digital content distribution can benefit from the same model. Rather than putting a file on a server and having users download it from a single source, CDN services intelligently push content to the edges of the network, where the end users are. Here’s why that’s important- just because the internet makes it easy for anyone to ‘virtually’ drive up to your office and pick up a brochure or a copy of a video, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea in practice, especially when you can save the trip for a large number of those customers.
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