Content delivery is still a major focus of what most companies do online. Whether it’s streaming video or making sure an e-commerce or media site is operating with the freshest content, delivered in the fastest way possible, the fundamentals remain. Content delivery needs to be fast, reliable, resilient across all geographies, networks and devices. While you can’t control all of these things, the trend in recent years has been to take control of content delivery by bringing content delivery networks (CDNs) in-house. In that sense, it’s not a new trend but is a trend that is picking up speed as more organizations realize the need for a customized approach to their content delivery. 

As is no surprise, the world’s media businesses are delivering more digital content, in more unique ways than ever before. And now more than ever, businesses are looking for ways to deliver that content quickly, reliably and at scale; but crucially at a cost that is manageable.

There once was a time that building your own CDN would have been unthinkable - complicated, expensive and not worth the hassle, considering that there were a number of well-known commercial CDN providers available who could make it easy to distribute content reliably across the geographies a company wanted to reach. CDN vendors offer the full package: hardware, software, network and so on, meaning that, for a long time, for most companies, convenience trumped other considerations. 

We, as users, are consuming (and producing) more content than ever, Cisco predicts that “global Internet traffic in 2021 will be equivalent to 127 times the volume of the entire global Internet in 2005. Globally, Internet traffic will reach 30 GB per capita by 2021, up from 10 GB per capita in 2016.”