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As mentioned above a web delivery model have multiple layers and should be optimized to my business requirements and future activities.

From my experience in this arena we should analyze the existing delivery model, map it with your IT initiatives and strategic business activities to line out a roadmap for growth.

Regardless of the strategy revealed by the roadmap, CDN will be a critical component to enable performance and security at scale. Consider evaluating IBM Edge Delivery Services for its capabilities in these areas.

For existing or new environments, meeting your business requirements is essential to constructing a web delivery model.

If you begin by leveraging a CDN like IBM’s Edge Delivery Services, you can design a lean architecture that utilizes traditional DCs or Cloud Environments.

The price and complexity to enable scale, protection, and fantastic end user experiences are significantly lessened using either approach, and enable your business to be highly flexible with whatever design they find most beneficial.

The Edge Delivery platform has over 220 servers worldwide and is usually accessible from 1 hop away from any internet pop

@Hman63 No CDN platform is larger: 220 Thousand Servers, in 3100 physical locations, within the networks of over 1400 Internet Service Providers.

@Hman63 I was mistaken in my number - 220 thousand as Dan pointed out.

We spoke about capabilities CDNs can provide like load balancing, workload offload and caching with application agnostics which means that we can take advantage in most scenarios incl. SoftLayer, Azure, AWS

Flexibility is key to a modern DC strategy. CDNs utilizing DNS integration are incredibly flexible, and are not impacted by shifting hosting providers.

You can use a CDN with any/all hosting providers, as long as the content is accessed over the Internet and resolved using DNS.

Moving DC's should not be a major factor when leveraging a CDN. Underlying infrastructure is the key

@Hman63 and keep in mind .. with Hybrid / Cloud the DC gets virtual but CDN will stay and by the facing point to teh end device

Let me point to Gartner and Forrester. They expect that this model will not scale and we have to think on protection which starts away from my compute center internet connection.

It’s relatively easy to scale attacks within the internet and hire additional attack resources. We see a continuous growing number attacks and also strength of traffic per attack.

And keep in mind an attack against one of your applications can result in an unreachability of your whole compute center!

using both appliance and cloud based is very common

if appliance is already deployed, cloud based DDoS and WAF makes sense

Your local appliance firewalls guard your perimeter from attack, and are an essential part of good security policy.

In the event of a high volume DDoS or Web Application attack, the inbound connection to your DC can be overwhelmed, like a long line at a store.

The result is legitimate requests are delayed to the point where users give up, or try another store. Remote scrubbing solutions target high request rates and block malicious traffic away from your datacenter.

Remote web application firewalls shield you from individual or high volume attacks against your site near the origin of each attack request.

using performance tools can definitely help in scoping need

there are both live and synthetic

good question!

Good questions.. I would go the other way round. Let's understand how a client scope today and show him the way to go different.

@Juergen_Loeb What are the key things we should keep in mind while understanding a client scope?

The monthly delivered traffic, mix of devices accessing the site, and performance expectations in each of the customer's key geography.

Definitely want to be mindful of what they're trying to accomplish. If performance is key, the offer should demonstrate improvement

The key points are -
expected number of concurrent users / peak loads like web campaigns / transaction business

if reliability is a key factor, then ensure the offer being used has the necessary redundancy

Denial of Service and data theft seems to be the biggest concerns in the market today. Customers are putting increased focus on these areas.

@NitinMathur21 Today's businesses are at risk for downtime, defacement, or data theft. If I had to pick 1, I'd be most concerned about Downtime first, then data theft.

definitely could depend on the type of industry

Healthcare providers for example are experience heavy attacks today, but FS and Pub sector are big as well

The financial impact of downtime is typically the easiest to calculate, and the easiest to mitigate. Datatheft, especially customer or Intellectual Property, has a much higher cost, that is harder to count.

Intent is to apply protection at multiple edges - internet, DC

Any organization without a 24/7 security solution that can address 0 day vulnerabilities is very open to these attacks. Managed security solutions offered by some CDNs are the perfect way to bolster protection.

@schaffer_akamai Great point! I bet these days organizations cannot tolerate downtime even for few seconds.

@Hman63 Does #SDE help enhance protection, specially in DC?

Keep in mind that we reroute / handle web traffic transparent for the application .. #SDE will just be an other technology at the backend

@Juergen_Loeb Got it!

@schaffer_akamai are there metrics available that points out the financial impact of such a downtime or DDoS. It would be worth looking at. I believe the figures would be astronomical.

While the cost of downtime will impact each business differently, some average yearly risk calculations by the Ponemon Institute: DDoS ~ $1.5 M/year. Web App Attack ~ $3.1M/year

The Cost of Denial of Service Attacks, Ponemon Institute: https://content.akam...

@schaffer_akamai Thanks Dan!

There are no technical changes require to implement a CDN solution. When migrating DCs or to a Cloud Provider, technical impact will vary.

What is the typical time to deploy te solution?

It's important to look for the Web / IT strategy. It can drive simplification for Cloud/Hybrid migration -- also reduce complexity for growth