What are the Important Features of CDN?

With the increasing use of OTT services worldwide, the content delivery network sector has become highly competitive.

FREMONT, CA: Even though its importance has always been evident, the role of a reliable content delivery network (CDN) in the evolving media environment has become increasingly apparent in recent years.

With an increase in content volumes and the rise of higher-resolution video to deal with, CDNs' ability to minimize hosting bandwidth by caching and lower the risk of service interruptions or diminished quality is now critical for most of the broadcasters as they attempt to meet the phenomenal demand for new and different content.

Although some companies choose a private CDN, often with a commercial CDN as a backup, with an increasing number of companies using multi-CDN setups, the public CDN market is booming and fiercely competitive. While achieving the lowest latency and highest quality will always be top priorities, security can quickly become one of the most significant differentiators.

Here are some of the functions of CDN that have helped it to maintain the demand for OTT. 

Protecting the Origin

CDNs typically conceal the origin servers, which ensures that clients never access the real origin server. All requests are routed through a CDN POP, which can typically provide the requested asset from its local cache. In the event of a cache miss, the CDN POP retrieves the asset from the origin server and stores it locally for future requests. Security and efficiency are the two significant advantages.

Security

A CDN comes with built-in security features. Since the traffic is distributed across several server locations, a higher number of POPs is less vulnerable to D-DOS attacks. Furthermore, most CDN services provide additional security features such as Bot Mitigation, Web Application Firewalls, rate limiting, and many more, which neutralize the network's threats rather than at the origin server and their local firewalls.

Scalability

A CDN's main feature is scalability, which means that any traffic fluctuations are managed. There's no need to pay for more traffic than is currently used when the expense is proportional to the number of bytes generated. CDNs, on the other hand, must be designed to manage the increase in traffic. Cloud CDNs are developed explicitly for multi-tenancy, with much more bandwidth than any single streaming consumer will ever need.