Download Delivery Advantages with the Edgio Platform

Delivering a seamless user experience ensures customer satisfaction and protects revenue. Whether you're trying to release a patch to resolve one of the latest OWASP vulnerabilities, launching a new game or application, or a new firmware/software update, it must happen instantly. The Edgio, formerly Edgecast, globally distributed network is optimized to deliver large files and quickly scales to deliver downloads to your globally distributed end users with industry-leading performance, reliability, and security. It’s why our customers, including some of the world’s largest software vendors, trust us to deliver games, patches, and large software and firmware updates to their users worldwide.

Here are a few advantages of working with Edgio to deliver your most important content, including:

1. A network optimized for fast and reliable download delivery

The Edgio network applies sophisticated Layer 7 load balancing technology to ensure higher cache hit ratios (origin offload efficiency) and performance. In addition to the advantages of BGP Anycast, which we use as our core network foundation for client request routing, our edge software architecture and algorithms enable us to consistently route requests for the same object to the same caching server every time. As load increases, we can quickly scale up the cache footprint across additional servers in a PoP to maintain performance. We incorporate several caching optimization and load-balancing strategies to ensure users get updates and files smoothly and reliably. Our network can easily handle the rigorous and unpredictable file delivery demands of the largest, most demanding enterprises.

2. Enterprise security to protect your brand and your end users from online threats

We built Edgio Security for speed and scale. Powered by our 250+ Tbps capacity and global network of 300 PoPs, your infrastructure is protected by a high-capacity shield close to attackers. Edgecast also processes your security updates worldwide in seconds. Our Dual WAF technology empowers your security teams to test new security rules in real time on real production traffic so they can be confident a security change won’t impact your end users’ delivery experience. For example, rate-limiting rules can be set up to prevent malicious botnet attacks that overwhelm your download portal with fake requests. Rate-limiting rules can also be used as a throttling mechanism to control how much your end users are downloading. If the end user does not need the entire file yet, you can optimize the download speed to stay ahead of what the user needs, reducing your costs by not having to pay for parts of a file an end user might not use.

3. Cost savings

We’ve helped some of the largest gaming, chip, and security software companies realize a more favorable cost structure while improving the performance of their software downloads. Origin offload efficiency is a top priority and is accomplished by some of the load balancing, caching strategies, and optimizations mentioned above. In addition, customers can preload the cache on the edge before a major software update. This is accomplished via APIs or through our portal. Customers preloading the cache with APIs can also incorporate it into their DevOps cycle and integrate it with their CI/CD pipeline. The network optimizations and other caching strategies, including preloading the cache, has the effect of collapsing requests and reducing the load on the origin infrastructure, reducing network egress fees from your storage provider, and improving the delivery performance for your customers.

Another cost-saving benefit is that you don’t need specialized expertise to interact with our network and costly professional services teams are not required to make changes. Our service model is oriented around helping you use APIs to configure our platform and customize file delivery so that software updates are available automatically for your end users.

4. Unparalleled visibility into how Edgio is performing

Edgio provides real-time data and visualizations about how the network performs when delivering your patches and file downloads. We mine a wealth of real-time data to help you spot significant trends, make smart decisions and implement crucial optimizations. For example, our Real-Time Log Delivery (RTLD) provides a holistic and actionable overview of network performance and security data to the endpoint of your choice. This helps you proactively monitor your traffic health, errors, latency, offloads, and performance so you can efficiently mitigate issues as they occur. And with RTLD, you can integrate WAF and rate-limiting data into your SIEM to power your threat intelligence.

Software downloads require a great network to meet the demands of worldwide delivery. They also require a robust service model to tune the delivery, work through issues and automate the fetching and loading of the software into the cache. Some CDNs have limited controls and flexibility, while others depend heavily on people to make changes. Other CDNs require customized coding or workarounds that add complexity to the management. The Edgio service model includes a flexible, customizable API-based management platform and engineers who can work directly with customers to optimize and automate the workflow.

To learn more about how the Edgio Platform can optimize your download delivery workflow, reduce your costs and grow your business, let's connect today.