CDSA

Keeps the Jewels: Secure

As we start off 2023, most organizations are now aware and adept to secure IT networks, focusing on workers and the facilities, as these resources have grown in scale and complexity.

Teams are diligent to harden perimeters, enable secure access, hopefully shifting to a model of zero-trust, and design intelligent network connections into locations ranging from the home office to headquarters, including new locations like public cloud and hosted facilities.

Meanwhile, the area of key growth for media/content producers and providers is the build and expansion of facilities to deliver their own products and services, either directly to the consumer, or through B2B interfaces. These infrastructure projects can range from a simple hosting of content, perhaps through a content distribution network (CDN), to multisite global deployments of an infrastructure stack that provides timely access to products and updates.

With the massive shift to subscription models, it has become clear to many content providers that controlling the largest section of the user experience possible is one of the best ways to ensure positive outcomes. As such, some organizations demand to control the overall online user experience more carefully, as it IS their entire brand.

While software-driven cloud solutions are incredibly flexible, dynamic and broad-reaching, they can become prohibitively expensive when scale ramps up and stays at increased levels, often the case for successful consumption services. As a means to such control, organizations may choose to build and manage their own infrastructure for these production networks due to the sheer scale of growth and capacity expectations.

In addition, the potential inconsistencies of a rented delivery solution can play a factor with selective consumers when compared to purpose-built infrastructure to provide a consistent user experience, under all load conditions.

Unlike IT networks, an outage on a revenue production content storage/delivery network has immediate and quantifiable ramifications. Unavailable services lead to customer satisfaction issues, failed renewals, and stunted subscription growth. Volumetric attacks like DDoS or even unexpected surges in customer activity driven by shopping or business cycles can render a service unusable to legitimate paying customers.

Worse, if a service tied to external business functions, the performance degradation can have a cascading effect to downstream organizations.

All modern shared cloud solutions have tools and tiers in place to mitigate these risks but scaling the services can be a cost variable undesired to the underlying organization.

Therefore, architecture design is critical to ensure redundancy and resiliency while operational support to control and react to any incident is of crucial concern.

With a consistent footprint, often referred to as a “stamp, pod, node” or other repeatable term deployed in either owned, leased, or shared facilities, the performance enabled by dedicated solutions, most often a combination of hardware and software technologies, allow operators to build upon predictable design expectations and specifications to meet the growing needs of successful application delivery.

Secure scale: on.

By John Jacobs, field CISO, Fortinet