When everything is in the cloud, does that make caching obsolete? Web hosting is used to host your website on a server. A CDN, on the other hand, delivers your content from a multi-server environment. What makes the multi-server environment work is caching.
It is estimated that by 2022, over 90% of enterprises will be relying on a hybrid cloud, a mixture of public and private cloud. The cloud today is the norm, hosting everything from websites, SaaS applications and over-the-top services along with data storage and disaster recovery. The rapid cloud adoption in the past decade comes as no surprise as set up is often quite simple and the pricing model is appealing because it scales with usage.
However, is the cloud the answer to all your problems? Migrating your mission-critical applications to the cloud is both beneficial and problematic at the same time. The benefits include smoother collaboration, automatic backups, and access to the latest updates and patches on an ongoing basis. However, latency and network congestions can cause poor performance for cloud-based applications used by enterprises all around the world.
The problem with the cloud is that access to content is dependent on Internet service. Anytime you want to access your cloud-based content, you must first make a request through the Internet, and that request must then go into the cloud, grab your content, and bring it back to you. Depending on the bandwidth available to you, this can be a slow process. If the objects you are interested in are large, like videos or high-definition images, then you may experience a slowdown or inconsistency in content delivery or applications performance as you compete with others using the same shared connection, this is commonly referred to as lag.
The reason for the latency has to do with the consumption of Internet bandwidth. When accessing cloud-based content, your request has to leave your fast-local network and use the lower-speed and often-times shared Internet bandwidth to gain access to your off-premise applications and content on the cloud. The Internet pipe becomes a chokepoint and causes performance issues. When the cloud solutions lack performance, productivity suffers.
A possible solution to the content lag problem is to purchase additional bandwidth, but bandwidth expansion is costly and provides only temporary relief from the problem. Sooner or later, the additional bandwidth will be consumed, and you will be back to the original problem.
A more permanent and less costly solution is to set up an on-premise, content acceleration cache, such as SuperLumin Content Accelerator (SCA), which provides an enterprise content management solution. SCA will accelerate access to cloud-based services and can be deployed at the Network Edge and at the Enterprise.
This means you can accelerate cloud-based applications, such as Microsoft 365, to suit your needs. SaaS applications, like Microsoft 365, are served from multiple secure server farms, with multiple hosts spanning several data centers. Not every host/domain carries enough content to warrant content acceleration. However, many domains can cause critical congestion on your Internet pipe and that means a lag in access.
SCA solutions use one static IP address to accelerate multiple domains and hosts. You can determine which hosts and domains will be accelerated through redirection to SuperLumin Content Accelerator and the ones that do not will get tunneled to the destination. With SuperLumin, you get the best of both worlds: use the cloud to host your web content as well as applications and use your local network to store mission-critical content. So even when the Internet is slow, your content loads quicker because it is stored on a local network. SuperLumin proprietary caching software will provide acceleration for small offices to full-scale core network traffic for large enterprises.