7/31/2019 Considerations for Cloud-Hosted Content Delivery
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CONSIDERATIONS FOR CLOUD-HOSTED CONTENT DELIVERY
2010-2011 Afidence, Inc. Proprietary & Confidential All
Rights Reserved No Reproduction or Redistribution Without Written
Permission
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Introduction
As many organizations explore cloud computing to improve their
IT service offerings, content delivery applications can
become logical candidates for consideration due to their
potential ability to mitigate a complex set of problems.
Common challenges include globally-dispersed networks, a large
mobile user base, a myriad of supported technologies
and bandwidth constraints. All of which can be obstacles to
ensuring organizational content is delivered reliably and
efficiently to end users.
Consideration #1: Content Requirements
The way a particular cloud-based system will be used, what types
of content will be deployed and how much data will be
stored may all be tied to ongoing service and usage costs. These
are important factors as they can cause pricing and
term structures to vary widely. Some content delivery vendors
adopt the philosophy of an agnostic solution with the
simple notion of pushing 1s and 0s. In essence, content is
staged and delivered regardless of type or format published.
Other providers may tailor their service for specific
applications, such as endpoint delivery of video or distribution
ofsecurity patches. Still others may blend the two approaches by
supporting an array of content types but in fact, their
core competency lies within a particular area. So in the early
stage of evaluation it becomes critical to articulate what
specific types of content are to be deployed within your
organization and realistically align this with the overall
supportability and pricing of solutions being considered.
This exercise also includes determining the typical file sizes
and delivery speed requirements of your application along
with defining content retention rates. When evaluating delivery
speed requirements, applications such as streaming
video will typically require the delivery of large amounts of
data that may put a strain on Internet egress points in a
cloud model and will not be nearly as tolerant to latency as
other services. When defining content retention rates,
understanding how content is systematically maintained with a
particular solution will help determine the level of
administration that will be required to ensure storage levels
and associated costs are maintained at efficiency.
Consideration #2: Administration
Minimizing network impact and extending reach while leveraging
existing systems is a key attraction of the cloud
content delivery model. Many services will send content as
normal HTTP traffic which readily accommodates both
internally and externally-connected clients. Some solutions may
integrate with existing services through the use of APIs
which offers additional suitability for the enterprise customer.
To further enhance efficiency, some vendors have even
integrated managed client-based peer-to-peer sharing (the
management aspect being the key distinguishing factor from
consumer-based applications). This approach is actually more
efficient for the corporate WAN as the number of peer
systems increase since most of the content delivery traffic
becomes LAN-based.
Consideration #3: Security and Data Privacy
Regulations around health and finance information as well as
European Union data privacy considerations may restrict
where information can be physically hosted and limit access to
that information. It is also important to understand any
data that is compiled at the client level and subsequently
published back to the cloud service. In essence, certain
businesses or applications may require the continued use of
internally-hosted solutions as a means to comply with
governance requirements.
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7/31/2019 Considerations for Cloud-Hosted Content Delivery
3/3
CONSIDERATIONS FOR CLOUD-HOSTED CONTENT DELIVERY
2010-2011 Afidence, Inc. Proprietary & Confidential All
Rights Reserved No Reproduction or Redistribution Without Written
Permission
- 2 -
By nature, content delivery applications are powerful tools, so
assessing both vendor posture and the application itself
becomes critical to minimizing exposure from security
vulnerabilities. For instance, a solidly built application
offered
from a provider with somewhat loose data center policies opens a
potential hole in your organizations infrastructure
that perhaps did not exist when all top tier content servers
were hosted internally. Thus, taking a holistic approach to a
security review of the cloud delivery solution will help ensure
the data is secure throughout the duration of the content
life cycle.
Summary
Depending on the size and complexity of an enterprise
environment, internally-hosted content delivery applications
can
be labor-intensive and carry an array of architectural baggage.
Cloud-based solutions can help reduce the administrative
overhead and increase overall performance for the
business-critical need of endpoint content delivery. Applications
are
available for the enterprise computing environment and becoming
increasingly mature but migration of these services
can be more appropriate for some than others depending on
intended usage and governance policies.
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