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Content delivery to help businesses

Alhough bandwidth is easily available, businesses will benefit with the help of Content Delivery Service Providers (CDSP), says Ajit Gupta, CEO, Speedera Networks India.

With broadband easily and cheaply available to Indian users, do you think companies will still need to use the services of a CDSP?

As the importance of broadband communication grows in India, more companies will wish to have a presence on the Internet. To provide robust, reliable service, companies have to invest heavily in their network infrastructure. They must have load balancing for non-stop delivery, caching for speedy Web response, and distributed and replicated servers to limit the impact of Internet congestion. Companies must have all this while they manage upstream bandwidth and strike a delicate balance between customer satisfaction and cost.

If every CTO decides to invest in getting infrastructure to manage Web performance, the costs are likely to be prohibitively high. This is where a CDSP comes in.

CDSPs use technologies such as caching to push replicated content close to the edge of the network. Global load balancing ensures that users are transparently routed to the 'best' content source. Stored content is kept current and protected against unauthorised modification. Customer-accessible traffic logs enable data mining for marketing and capacity planning.

What kind of portals and Web sites are more likely to use the services of a CDSP?

They could be technology companies, e-retail, e-marketing or even government organisations. All of them realise that the cost and effort spent on delivering content online can be outsourced easily and effectively.

To their advantage, they find that outsourcing their Web sites has ensured that a high level of performance is maintained at critical times without having to spend exorbitant amounts.

- Soutiman Das Gupta