CDN (Content delivery Network) helps organizations delivering their digital assets including – documents, files, contents, applications, APIs, Videos, software to customers and end users quickly in real time. Limelight committed to delivers all type of digital assets in quickly and securely with Limelight edge service platform via private IP network. In an exclusive interview with Ashwin Rao, Director at Limelight Networks India, we discuss Limelight’s presence and targeting strategies for Indian market, Limelight CDN performance, reliability and customer experience.
Q: Tell us about Limelight’s global CDN presence and what are the expectations from Indian market?
Ashwin Rao: Limelight Networks has a robust global content delivery network which includes more than 100 Points of Presence (PoPs), a direct connection to over 1,000 internet service providers (ISPs), 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), and egress and ingress capacity in excess of 42 Tbps. Moreover, we facilitate sub-second delivery of online video content globally. This has helped Limelight to gain the trust of several global players including Napster, Nintendo, DoCoMo, BBC, and Marvel alongside others who have deployed our services. Several Indian pioneers including MX Player, Toppr and Cinesoft have also adopted Limelight’s CDN solutions.
In India, we aim to further our technological offerings within the market, which is maturing because of rapid digitization. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, the Indian internet networks will be experiencing a data load of 646 petabytes per day (1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabytes) by 2022. This is 490 percent higher than, or almost 5 times, our data usage back in 2017. This data surge will require advanced technological solutions to seamlessly manage traffic and makes the market very promising for Limelight Networks.
Q: Tell us more about the technologies you use to deliver digital assets. How secure is this?
Ashwin Rao: Limelight Networks has one of the world’s largest, private global networks, enabling you to bypass internet congestion and avoid many security potholes. This helps us in eliminating the data congestion that is otherwise experienced within the public internet and deliver industry-leading performance.
Secondly, we deliver advanced solutions including real-time streaming, edge computing, web acceleration, and origin storage. On the security front, Limelight’s cloud security services offer a layered defense against malicious website attacks and unauthorized content access without impacting the performance of your web applications and content delivery.
Limelight CDN solutions are integrated with DDoS, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and Bot Management protection for end-to-end delivery-related security concerns. We have also deployed an award-winning SmartPurge, which is able to remove more than a million malicious objects in less than a second.
Q: We see a huge competition in the market; What Limelight has planned for 2019?
Ashwin Rao: Our focus is on expanding our business footprint in India to extend our CDN services to manage the end-to-end content delivery needs of business throughout India. We enable global real-time streaming with sub-second delivery, which expands the avenues for the Indian media networks to target the ripe global market. In addition, Limelight’s edge cloud eliminates the delays inherent in using traditional cloud computing environments for low-latency IoT and real-time applications.
Q: What is the biggest challenge Limelight is facing in India?
Ashwin Rao: India is the world’s second-most populous country and the seventh-largest country in terms of landmass. Both of these factors introduce unique challenges in content distribution. The nation has a completely diverse population as well as topography which makes the process of content dissemination quite intricate. However, Limelight Networks has aptly resolved this challenge by deploying 3 PoPs so far in India and tying up with local ISPs. We are continuing to invest in the region and add capacity to meet the fast growing demand for high quality online video.
Q: Organization biggest priority is to secure their digital assets and data but malicious attacks and data breaches report shows organization fails to combat cybersecurity. How Limelight cloud security help organizations to combat cyberattacks?
Ashwin Rao: Limelight’s Cloud Security solution offers a comprehensive suite of services to secure digital assets and protect the infrastructure. This includes WAF protection, TLS/SSL encryption, IP address whitelisting/blacklisting, and DDoS protection. Our DDoS Attack Interceptor is both scalable and cost-effective and has multi-layered defence mechanisms to detect malicious traffic, promptly notify as attacks are detected, provide high-capacity scrubbing, and attack mitigation.
Q: How you are seeing Limelight in India by 2020?
Ashwin Rao: For Limelight, the primary growth drivers are going to be connected devices, low latency streaming, gaming, and the OTT industry. India will also launch 5G services by 2020, which will pave the way for novel industry concepts such as Industry 4.0, Logistics 4.0, and so on. This will directly augment the demand for edge computing in India and Limelight Networks is better poised to tap this imminent market demand.
Q: What are the key points to check before choosing a CDN provider?
Ashwin Rao: Primarily, one must analyse the precise requirement from a CDN solution provider. Map your application to key metrics such as where is the audience located, where the originates from (on-premises, single location in cloud, multiple locations in cloud) as well as the capabilities required such as web content, file distribution, live video, Video on Demand, etc. Also, check what defence mechanisms are required such as TLS/SSL encryption, DDoS protection, WAF protection, Digital Rights Management, and so on.
Secondly, what are your CDN implementation goals? If you are a first-time CDN customer, you must define an achievable initial phase and further evaluate your way forward subsequently. Multi-CDN customers and the transitioning ones must check their load balancing and how the operations will be ramped up with the new CDN and ramped down from the previous one.
Above all, check the support that is available with your new CDN. Is it available round the clock, in multiple languages and regions, is there an appropriate customer notification system, and are there any applicable charges for the support? Also, does your CDN provides robust APIs for self-provisioning and configuration, is there a web-based GUI for it, what are the capabilities of self-provisioning, and is a demo available? Other factors to consider include the expertise of Professional Services team, specialized support offerings for major events, is workflow consulting available, and has the CDN provider solved similar problems for other customers.
Q: Key Focus Areas Limelight is targeting in India?
Ashwin Rao: Limelight Networks is primarily focused on helping OTT players in India. This is because the digital penetration is increasing the content consumption within the nation. It is also driving the demand of digital services for traditional use cases including shopping (e-commerce), logistics, automation (which requires intensive real-time data handling), and so on. So, Limelight Networks CDN is targeting all of these areas with its real-time streaming and edge services.
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