ECDN 101: Enterprise Content Delivery Networks: An Overview

Definition of ECDNs

Unfortunately, company or enterprise networks weren't built to carry the weight of this avalanche of words, pictures, movies and sound. However, many enterprises have realized that having access to what's known as "rich" media content is incredibly valuable; and have begun to equip their enterprise networks to support the successful delivery of that content--while ensuring that employees, vendors and partners always have immediate access. (Rich media is defined as digital media such as streaming media, policy and user manuals, and various employee forms and documents.)

That's really what an Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) is all about--an infrastructure that lets companies deliver rich digital media to employees, vendors, partners and customers worldwide, in the fastest amount of time at the lowest possible cost.

ECDNs are attractive because they can increase a network's performance, scalability, and reliability. They can enhance content availability, efficiently move large files closer to end users, and help curtail travel and business training expenses by supporting e-learning applications.

An ECDN, in general, encompasses all aspects of distributing, accelerating, accessing and managing this rich media content throughout an enterprise. Content can be things like marketing materials fueling a new product launch, on-line seminars, or a new corporate training or sales videos, accessible anywhere, anytime, to pre-defined targeted audiences.

What's more, building an ECDN is not nearly as complex as most people perceive. In fact, ECDNs are simply a combination of an "application-aware network" with intelligent traffic management and content networking products--creating an infrastructure that enables applications to work better while ensuring correct delivery of content and efficient traffic throughput.+

Private vs. Public CDNs
At this early stage of the enterprise content delivery market there seems to be some general misconceptions about public CDN (the Akamais of the world) vs. the private or enterprise CDN. We use a public CDN when we don't have control over the network or the end users that wish to have access to the content. With the public CDN, you're basically taking content from an Internet data center, and pushing it across the network closer to end users located at random points on the Internet. The goal is to eliminate a number of router hops, and more importantly, eliminate a lot of the slow peering that happens between Internet backbones. Pushing that content to the end or edge of the network eliminates those bottlenecks.

On the ECDN side, the bottleneck isn't the Internet--it's the enterprise network. So, with an ECDN, the goal is to take content and push it out to the edge of the enterprise network to alleviate the access problem. That's one aspect.

The other aspect involves understanding of your target audience. With the public CDN, you're trying to deliver content and information to users that are connected across the Internet. Where, in a private, or ECDN, you're delivering content to your own users on your own enterprise network. With an ECDN, you have control over the network, and your target audience consists mainly of your own employees connected to that enterprise network.

Return on Investment
In terms of cost savings and return on investment (ROI) for ECDNs, a classic example is the cost savings realized through training. Consider an organization that has to fly in their sales and perhaps engineering staff into a central site a couple of times a year for sales incentive initiatives and corporate training. Gartner Research analyzed a typical organization and the number of employees they have per location. They found that, if a company runs two of those types of training session in a virtual method, using ECDNs, you could pay for the infrastructure. In that specific scenario, the return on investment realized can occur that quickly.

Of course, there is still clear justification in doing business face-to-face. But even if you conduct one of every two of those big business meetings using ECDN technologies, you can basically justify the cost over the course of 12 to 18 months.

And once you've built the infrastructure, you can use it for other things as well. A best practices approach would be to have very targeted video information and video content that answers specific questions and is relatively short in terms of time constraints. So, for example, while a system engineer might be willing to sit through an hour of detailed product information, consider the sales executive's perspective. They want to know, quickly, the key aspects that differentiate their product from the competitors. So a three- or four-minute video clip, accessible anywhere, is perfect for that particular audience.

This example shows the control aspect I talked about earlier, and is one of the key advantages of ECDNs over CDNs.

In my next class, I'll talk a little about the specific building blocks or products required to create the enterprise CDN.