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Traditionally, content delivery networks (CDNs) were used to cache files close to consumers, enabling media publishers to stream video and gaming software to customers as quickly as possible, and allowing high-stakes web application providers to deliver web pages equally fast.

Eventually, application and content owners found these networks had use beyond caching that enabled digital experiences to be better, safer, and more personalized and profitable. The market responded with edge platforms, an evolution of CDNs that can handle the compute and data workloads that were historically the domain of data centers and clouds. Edge platforms are now a fundamental part of every consumer-facing business’s digital stack.

How does this evolution from traditional CDN to an Edge platform help businesses and improve consumer experiences?

Benefit 1: holistic security protection

With the proliferation of on-premise, cloud, and SaaS systems, technology leaders are struggling to protect an increasingly diverse and expanding attack surface area from bad actors. Further, leaders often tend to overcompensate by implementing chains of security solutions, creating single points of failure, and adding latency and performance bottlenecks between security layers. Given that the average web page generates 65-70 requests on mobile and desktop, and latency accumulates with every page, performance, in turn, is negatively impacted.

The distributed nature of modern applications across multiple clouds, on-prem data centers, and SaaS tools means that the traditional notion of a security perimeter is no longer applicable. To ensure holistic protection, organizations must adopt an edge-enabled solution that can be present across all these environments, otherwise, routing all traffic through a central office using VPNs can cause undesirable latencies and network costs.

By moving security to the edge – in front of cloud providers, application, and storage servers – your infrastructure and data is protected wherever it lives.

Benefit 2: increased consumer experience with speed and AI-driven personalization

Generally, the closer you can move compute to the user, the faster your application will be. Edge computing enables companies to push components of web applications down to the edge of the network and even into the consumer’s device, speeding up page loads on web and mobile devices.

To do so requires intelligent predictive prefetching, which anticipates what actions, data or content the consumer will need next, and pushes the info to their browser or mobile device in anticipation of the request. This effectively makes web pages and mobile screens load instantly.

In addition to speed, the edge can be the ideal layer to implement personalization informed by first-party data or AI algorithms. Organizations can use the knowledge of their end users’ preferences, keywords searches, and geolocation to display products that are relevant to the user in real time.

Benefit 3: reduced costs

Nearly 75% of executives consider edge computing a strategic investment, in part due to the lower cost of bandwidth. Edge computing allows local data centers to crunch their own data instead of sending it to a central data center or the cloud. By processing locally, the amount of transmitted data across the network is greatly reduced, resulting in less bandwidth and connectivity.

Remote servers or data centers act independently, regardless of outages or connectivity to the central data center. Removing dependency on a central network allows digital businesses to be more available and agile in constantly changing markets.

Edgio

To realize true cost savings from the edge requires a balanced approach. Sometimes, it’s more efficient to compute a workload in the cloud and cache it to multiple edge nodes, instead of having all nodes execute redundant work. That’s why it’s important to use a holistic application platform, such that of Edgio’s, that allows you intelligently leverage the capabilities of both the cloud and edge for peak performance and cost optimization.

Conclusion

Edge platforms are taking the market share of traditional CDNs and cloud providers for their wider range of use cases and advanced capabilities. Businesses are improving their security posture, performance, and consumer experiences, while reducing overall costs from edge compute and AI capabilities, real-time responses, and intelligent migration of workloads.

Edgio is a global edge network with an integrated developer-friendly platform designed to offer the highest levels of performance and protection for digital content, boosting overall revenue and business value.

Digital Transformation

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Software development teams can transform or constrict a modern enterprise in today’s digital economy. As such, many organizations are starting to invest in enhancing the developer experience, understanding that a frictionless process can improve business outcomes and drive higher performance.

Organizations encounter friction when shifting gears to cloud and multi-cloud, especially as they scale – and amplified when coupled with the adoption of Kubernetes and open source.

Many organizations stumble into multi-cloud when autonomous business units within the company start using these technologies on their own, considering only their unique business needs (as they should) but typically without corporate standards top of mind, as each business unit dives in, islands of tech stacks, tooling, and processes form, creating development, security, and operational challenges.

A lack of holistic strategy towards tools, processes, talent, or management can create silos, inconsistencies and can create more manual hand-offs and longer wait times on the path to production. Companies cannot achieve the agility, cost savings, or performance benefits of multi-cloud. Instead of advancing their cloud objectives, they create unmanaged risks and add more friction to software delivery.

McKinsey studied the pipeline problem and noted that with proper execution, companies achieve “developer velocity” — namely speed — when they master the tools, culture, product management, and talent management. Of these, McKinsey explains, “best-in-class tools are the primary driver of developer velocity.”

“Companies that excel in providing the right tools, culture, product management, and talent management not only develop software faster but also deliver significantly stronger business outcomes,” concluded the McKinsey report. Companies that remove “points of friction and unleash the full potential of development talent can achieve 60% higher shareholder returns and 20% higher operating margins.”

Why haven’t more firms resolved their snowflake approach to software development and delivery issues with so much at stake?

For one thing, the landscape of software development has increased in complexity every year. Even tools that aim to provide more flexibility, such as Kubernetes and containers, have a significant learning curve and are only part of the puzzle. Many companies are yet to invest in the right tools, talent, or practices to harness multi-cloud and tame its management complexity.

Yet, looked at another way, multi-cloud provides a compelling opportunity for the Development, Security, and Operations teams to align and modernize their approach to building, managing, and securing cloud-native applications.

Three pillars to mastering multi-cloud application platforms

To master multi-cloud, reduce risk, and remove friction from development processes, we advise enterprises to develop their capabilities and resources in these three essential areas.

1 — platform teams: An evolution from siloed technology teams to a multidisciplinary platform team responsible for building and running a set of services and tools for developers to build and run applications that drive business revenue. They’re the glue that connects your development team, IT infrastructure and operations team, and security team, but they also manage the requirements from business stakeholders. A good platform team acts with a product mindset; treating their development teams as customers and managing their platform like an internal business within a business. 

A platform team functions most efficiently when it obtains visibility into all facets of DevSecOps — to make real-time adjustments to projects in the development pipeline. To accomplish this, a platform team requires a unified data management model that consolidates inputs from disparate sources, the ability to correlate disparate data to an application, and generate dashboards to share with key stakeholders.

A platform team measures what matters for the organization, including KPIs related to the performance and outcomes for the business lines they support, the adoption of the platform services, productivity and effectiveness of the developers using the platform, and metrics related to reliability and security compliance.

2 — cloud-native architecture standards: Many organizations begin their Kubernetes journey in the cloud with one of the many managed Kubernetes services available. This helps the process of getting started and after an initial learning curve, an app team can be up and running. Kubernetes and containers bring new layers of abstraction to the application environment that can improve resource utilization and separate additional infrastructure concerns from the business logic, enabling accelerated development and delivery cycles.

With multi-cloud Kubernetes use, organizations must consider the adoption of platform capabilities that are uniform across different technologies to provide a consistent developer interface, the standardization of templates, and secure supply chains lower the learning curve of Kubernetes best practices and operationalize DevSecOps practices. Consistent Lifecycle and policy management across disparate Kubernetes is needed for operational efficiency and compliance. These capabilities enable you to have a faster, and more secure path to production for your applications in a manner that is flexible and adaptable to your business.

3 — enforce guardrails: Achieving developer velocity is a crucial objective for a modern enterprise. But the real trick is accelerating software development without sacrificing security and compliance along the way. While good governance is an enabler, well-defined guardrails help to shift these security best practices left invisibly to the developer and make this leap possible. Guardrails ensure environments start with the right configurations from the moment they are provisioned.

Effective guardrails must be baked into every step of the cloud native application lifecycle. With policy-driven guardrails, DevSecOps focuses on rapidly detecting and remediating cloud vulnerabilities to strengthen the overall compliance, and security posture. Then, the focus turns to optimizing costs and better aligning cloud spending to application needs and business objectives.

Proactive governance

Today, 87% of enterprises report using two or more clouds, according to the VMware Research and Insights study from 2022. Kubernetes is the platform technology of choice for these deployments, with nearly all (98%) of respondents from VMware’s 2023 State of Kubernetes report experiencing operational benefits of Kubernetes. Kubernetes and multi-cloud have become the technology foundation for modern business to accelerate application development and delivery.

Investing in guardrails for proactive governance and a secure software supply chain lays the groundwork for frictionless app deployments. Establishing a platform team and adopting a product mindset will go a long way toward preparing your enterprise to succeed in a multi-cloud world. Beyond that, running a platform — like a product can increase developer velocity, leading to “meaningful performance improvements,” says McKinsey.

No matter how your firm arrives at multi-cloud, with the right tools, talent, and a product mindset, any company can make multi-cloud a long-term business success.

To learn more, visit us here.

Cloud Computing

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The all-encompassing digital workplace platform 

Work as we know it has changed in the past few years coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Communications and collaboration technology were critical to that shift. As a result, we have witnessed the evolution of communications and collaboration suites to UCaaS platforms that are now evolving into fuller all-encompassing digital workplace platforms with deeper integration with CCaaS and strategic lines of business applications. As a result, the lines are blurring, and the days of silo applications that do one thing, like conferencing, are giving way to fuller platforms aimed at being more strategic solutions for helping companies run their entire business.  

We see from one end of the market (mainly small and midsize businesses) that providers like Zoho fully position their platform as the operating system for business. In their favor, they have the platform and myriad applications to make a strong claim. Collaboration and office productivity providers, such as Microsoft and Google, have evolved into digital workplace platform providers with the core applications companies need to run their businesses. Recently, as part of its fuller Zoom One platform strategy, Zoom announced the addition of email and calendar along with its expanded team chat functionality to rival Microsoft and Google. And that goes along with its complete contact center offering. With its acquisition of Slack, Salesforce has made it the collaborative hub of the platform that powers critical customer workflows in sales and marketing use cases, amongst others.  

This chat-enabled collaboration hub feature is becoming a common key identifier in these new-era digital workplace platforms. Take RingCentral, for example; they have a unified UCaaS and CCaaS offering with an in-context collaboration feature set that spans voice, video, and integrated team chat as the connecting hub. Similarly, Cisco Webex boasts UCaaS and CCaaS with a chat-enabled collaboration hub and an expansive portfolio of workplace devices. 

Technology vendors are always looking at adjacencies but what is happening now is the strong undercurrent of providing fuller platforms that support cross-business functions. Vendors have long realized they need to be the glue that connects rather than individual product providers. While this makes me reminisce back to the messaging middleware days, this is where we are now with digital workplace technology platforms.  

Low-code/no-code offerings are also emerging as critical features of digital workplace solutions to enable organizations to build applications to support essential business processes and workflows flexibly.   

Workplace transformation requires solutions-focused tech platforms 

In response to the ongoing digital transformation and disruption every business is going through, these platforms have to provide relevant business solutions that specifically support lines of business domains. Each solution set must, at its core, offer satisfactory experiences to both internal employees and external customers and partners. Business processes and workflows incorporate a continuum of conversational experiences between people, apps, and data in multidirectional iterations. 

The effect is a collaborative ecosystem and community of constituents that require seamless connectivity. Therefore, organizations must focus on the collaboration and community aspect of business processes and workflows. Every business process involves a series of collaborative events between various internal and external actors. 

They may include physical meetings, conference calls, videoconferences, and chat and email interactions. These are the points at which people come together to create, inform, negotiate, or persuade each other in ways that advance the process. Other nodes in the process include work done independently by each actor, such as planning, analysis, document creation, etc. 

The output of these intervening sessions is generally input to the next step, and part of the integration process is to make this data and content available to the right actors at the right time. This step involves shared middleware services such as access control and authentication, scheduling, and content management. Enterprise planners and decision-makers must evaluate digital workplace platforms and solutions by how they can support collaborative business workflows. The flexibility of the platform is critical. 

Final thoughts 

While new all-encompassing digital workplace platform offerings are emerging, each provider’s partner and developer ecosystem will be critical. Therefore, it must be an evaluation criterion in decision-making. First, evaluate providers’ offerings on the ability to integrate into existing infrastructure to minimize friction. Ensuring people are at the center of this, clearly define the goals and objectives of the workplace, and identify the specific needs and requirements of the organization. This step will help ensure that the chosen platform can support the desired workflows and collaboration processes and comes down into the flow of how people work in the organization. 

Collaboration Software, Remote Work

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Most CIOs are limited by their endpoint tools. They know the questions they need to answer about their endpoint environment. They know what actions they must take to manage and secure their endpoints at all times. But they are attempting to answer these questions and take these actions using legacy point tools that no longer work in today’s environments. 

For CIOs to solve these problems, they first need to replace those legacy tools with a new class of converged endpoint management platforms. 

What’s changed? The entire endpoint environment 

In the past, CIOs had to manage and secure a relatively limited number of endpoints, most of which lived on-premises within technology environments that rarely changed.  

CIOs now need to manage and secure millions of dynamic, diverse, and globally distributed endpoints located across cloud and hybrid networks. Each of these endpoints introduces operational risks and security vulnerabilities and must be monitored, managed, and secured in real-time to ensure their performance.  

These endpoints also face a growing wave of cybersecurity attacks. Today, a ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds, and the potential impact of a breach continues to grow as business processes become increasingly digital and interconnected. 

Unfortunately, many CIOs are struggling to manage and secure their new endpoint environment. They are still using legacy point tools designed to work in the small, static environments of yesterday and are failing in the endpoint realities today. Here’s why.

Silos: Why legacy point tools are failing in today’s environments

Most legacy endpoint tools were built to perform one task—often for just one endpoint category—and operate independently from each other. When CIOs attempt to develop a complete endpoint management and security capability using these tools, they are forced to build a stack of dozens of point solutions. And as the endpoint environment has transformed with new endpoints and new operational and security risks to mitigate, CIOs have been forced to keep adopting more and more tools.

The result? Using legacy endpoint management and security tools, organizations…

Face a growing visibility gap. According to recent research, 95% of organizations have 20% of their endpoints undiscovered and unprotected. 
Wrestle with increased complexity. 75% of IT, security, and business leaders now report too much complexity from their technology, data, and operations.
Can’t answer basic questions. These include â€œHow many endpoints do I have? What applications run on them? How many have basic controls applied?”

These tools are also creating silos between IT and security teams. Many are licensed and used by individual functions, teams, and employees, giving everyone a different view of the endpoint environment and making it impossible to build cohesive end-to-end endpoint management and security processes. Worst of all, they stop IT and security from collaborating on key efforts such as applying patches and configurations to close commonly exploited endpoint vulnerabilities. 

Clearly, legacy point tools are failing to manage and secure today’s endpoint environments. CIOs need new tools built around a new approach. 

The solution: Converged endpoint management platforms

CIOs need a new technology solution that corrects the problems with legacy point tools and overcomes the challenges of endpoint explosion, tool proliferation, and IT modernization. This solution must offer a holistic approach to endpoint management and security that unifies three core aspects of these activities. It must cover:

Every endpoint: They must create visibility across laptops, desktops, mobile devices, containers, sensors, and every other type of endpoint from one agent. 
 Every workflow: They must perform a full range of actions—from asset discovery to threat hunting, to client management—all from a single console.
Every team: They must use this single source of truth and common set of tools to align cross-functional teams and individual roles.  

A new class of converged endpoint management (XEM) platforms meets these criteria. These platforms consolidate the functionality of dozens of point tools into a single dashboard where teams can see, control, and trust everything happening on their endpoints. By doing so, these converged platforms give CIOs and their teams:

Real-time visibility and a single source of truth for their endpoint data
Reduced tool sprawl and significantly less complexity to manage
Instant and accurate answers to their most important questions

Most importantly, converged platforms eliminate silos in endpoint management and security. They act as the backbone for all crucial interactions between endpoint data, controls, and teams in one place, offering IT, security, risk management, and other technology functions a single space to seamlessly collaborate from. With the right platform, you can drive most of your endpoint use cases for most roles:

CIOs can patch, update and properly configure their endpoints.
CISOs can investigate and respond to threats in real time.
Infrastructure teams can scope cloud migrations in weeks (not years).
Procurement teams can see if they’re licensing software they don’t need.
Data custodians can find and remove sensitive data at scale.
Auditors can track if a company complies with its regulations and compliance.

In sum: With the right converged endpoint management platform, CIOs can solve most of their core operations and security challenges. 

Picking the right converged endpoint management platform

The endpoint tool market is going through a transformation, with these new converged platforms rapidly replacing old point tools. When evaluating the right platform to adopt converged endpoint management, CIOs must ensure they select a solution that provides three key qualities. 

Visibility into every managed or unmanaged endpoint in real time.
Control across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid estates in seconds. 
Truth composed of accurate, high-fidelity data for every endpoint team. 

Consider these table-stakes for any converged endpoint management solution you evaluate, and the key to solving most modern endpoint management and security challenges created by legacy tools. 

Learn how Tanium converged endpoint management platform can solve your core operations and security challenges here.

Endpoint Protection