Rocket to the Edge: How performance is driving innovation in content delivery

Many industries were hit hard in 2020 due to the pandemic. But those sectors either trading in or moving large amounts of digital content experienced an explosion in growth that shows no sign of slowing up, with video, entertainment, gaming, and ecommerce benefiting from an (almost literally) captive audience. 

Skyrocketing demand for media highlights the necessity of CDNs for effective and efficient distribution of content. But it also puts a focus on the shortcomings of a largely centralized legacy infrastructure when it comes to serving a more geographically dispersed audience.

National lockdowns and work-from-home policies coupled with an ever growing number of mobile devices, means users are increasingly demanding content farther from origin servers and also likely not optimized for their particular device.

This trend is emerging in parallel with the evolution of a next-generation CDN infrastructure that is seeing edge PoPs move away from being caching servers to becoming edge-compute nodes capable of real-time analytics and data processing.

But this doesn't mean that the CDN in the traditional sense is no longer relevant. In fact, it's become a somewhat overlooked opportunity for innovation.

So, at a time when performance matters more than ever, where is innovation today making up for your consumers' decreasing tolerance of a mediocre experience?