New CDN Services to Challenge WAN
New CDN services are constantly being developed by CDN providers as they seek to enter new markets and entice new customers to try their services.
Now, according to a new report published by Gartner, the lastest new CDN services on offer by providers aim to help enterprise clients shift away from using WAN services and instead take advantage of the benefits of CDNs and cloud computed for their distributed data storage and delivery needs.
Ted Chamberlin, Gartner’s research vice president of cloud service providers, who wrote the report highlighting this trend, notes that CDNs have the perfect infrastructure to provide these value added services thanks to their widely distributed points of presence that are usually located at internet traffic hotspots around the globe.
“I honestly think the biggest threat to edge routing and switching, and even traditional firewalls in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) devices, is from CDNs that can really take away that market,” he said. “It’s only recently they have woken up and realized that they can fairly easily supplant the WAN edge device market.”
New CDN Services Benefits
“As companies move web-facing work to public clouds, CDNs really got a bump in growth and became more nimble,” Chamberlin went on to say. “They became sort of the next thing you did after you deployed web infrastructure out of public clouds.”
“When companies deploy websites, usually, the next thing they do is deploy a CDN to get their content as close to users as possible,” Chamberlin said. The strategic deployment of CDNs — based on hundreds of thousands of caching, compute and storage nodes in data centers around the world — make them logical providers of ancillary services, he said.
“The aha moment came when CDN providers realized they could offer so much more than webpage acceleration. Functions like duplication of data, compression and caching were all things that individual devices did in a discreet manner. CDNs already have that deployed at their PoPs [points of presence] and can just turn those features on for customers,” he said.