Whether you have one CDN or many, an origin shield is a must-have as part of your resilience and risk mitigation strategy. If something goes wrong, the CDN itself can become a DDoS attack on your origin (the whole reason you want origin shielding in the first place!). And, as we’ve learned from recent events that saw half of the internet go offline for 49 minutes, no one can afford to have a single point of failure. 

Whether you deploy a single CDN or rely on a multi-CDN strategy, an origin shield is a must-have to reduce the load on the origin, protect it from overload, and safeguard performance and QoE. 

The level of global video streaming has skyrocketed since the Covid-19 crisis began, with more people staying at home, watching video across all their devices. The carbon footprint of this nonstop viewing isn’t easy to calculate, but it’s fair to say that it’s significant. One aggressive claim cites a six-hour video binge on Netflix as equivalent to burning a liter of fuel. Streaming involves a complex mix of data center capacity and electricity -- both of which produce carbon dioxide, the levels of which vary depending on the technology being used.

Sometime during the 2020-21 Covid-19 pandemic, video streaming, which had already gained a foothold in terms of mass-market entertainment, took a big lead over linear TV. Consumers started cutting the cord en masse, as they’d long been predicted to do. A proliferation of digital-first content providers and robust streaming technology coupled with people being stuck in their homes for what felt like infinity created the perfect conditions for OTT video streaming to take what’s traditionally been the domain of TV broadcasters by storm.