On a daily basis businesses across the world consider how they are connecting with their increasingly hyper-connected customers.
They rely on the internet to deliver fantastic experiences and facilitate instant communication wherever and whenever their customers want. And increasingly businesses are looking for insight that will help them to further improve that connection.
We speak to John Dillon, VP of Marketing EMEA at Akamai about the importance of tracking and analysing web traffic and what this means for businesses.
TechRadar Pro: Akamai recently announced that the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics drove more than 1Tbps of online video traffic across the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Can you tell us more about the platform and what it does?
John Dillon: The platform is made up of a distributed network of servers and intelligent software, delivering over two trillion interactions daily. No one delivers more web traffic than Akamai – up to 30% of all Web traffic at any given time – and 90% of Internet users are a single network hop away.
The Intelligent Platform consists of over 147,000 servers in 92 countries and constantly makes decisions about how to route traffic based on comprehensive knowledge of network conditions combining real-time data on traffic type, bottlenecks, devices and connection methods.
The platform can provide device-level detection and optimisation, and deliver great business insights about a company's customers and online habits, as well as identify, absorb, and block security threats.
It's also worth noting that our Sochi traffic actually peaked at 3.5Tbps during the men's hockey semi-final between the U.S. and Canada.
TRP: Presumably the Intelligent Platform can provide you with very broad analysis of Internet activity. What do you do with that information?
JD: It does, and we use the information primarily to ensure that content is delivered to end users in the most efficient way to give them a seamless online experience regardless of their connection method and device.
But we also use it to help our customers understand the trends that are happening online across the globe in terms of connectivity, IPv6 penetration, mobile usage, security attacks and broadband speeds.
We've been publishing the quarterly State of the Internet report for over five years now – the data has given us, and anyone that looks at the reports, an unparalleled insight.
We now have a companion iOS application and online visualisations that allow anyone to see how the data has changed over time.
TRP: What does the data tell you about increasingly large and sophisticated attacks on the internet and what do you think is likely to happen as more and more enterprises move to use cloud services?
JD: DDoS attacks are getting bigger in scale all the time. Earlier this year the web saw an attack reach 400 Gbps which is astounding! We saw something interesting in Q3 2013 though - for the first quarter since we started tracking DDoS attacks the volume was down on the previous quarter.
This is not a glimmer of hope though - at the end of the third quarter, our customers had already reported more DDoS attacks than during the whole of 2012.
As for the impact on enterprises that consume cloud services, it's really a matter of choosing the right suppliers. A cloud service should be designed with failure in mind so that it can react and work around failures or blockages as they occur – which they inevitably will.
TRP: Do you enable customers to track activities on the Internet, such as DDoS attacks or where traffic peaks are occurring?
JD: 15-30% of the world's web traffic is delivered over the Akamai platform. We combine this global scope with constant data collection to construct an accurate and comprehensive picture of what's happening on the internet. Our customers can use the Luna Control Centre to manage and monitor their services in great detail.
This used to be information that could only be seen by our customers but now we have a number of visualisations that are publicly available, and use real time information, to show what is happening on the web: how fast is data moving? Where's the most congestion? What events are causing spikes in web activity?
TRP: Given that Akamai has so many large broadcasting customers, are you able to comment on the growth of live broadcast streaming and how you see this developing in the future?
JD: With every event that we are involved in we see live streaming move forward, not only in terms of quality, or demand from consumers, but in the ways in which broadcasters integrate it into their programming and online presence.
We saw peak event traffic for the Winter Olympics in Sochi reach 3.5 Trillion bits per second (Tbps), during the U.S. vs. Canada Men's Hockey Semifinal. That rate is four times higher than our platform peak during Usain Bolt's 100m dash in the London 2012 Olympics summer games.
The total traffic delivered by the Akamai Intelligent Platform for the Winter Olympics was more than 70% higher than for London 2012.
Second Screen is another great concept that expect to see grow in the future: content streamed to your TV and related content that you can interact with delivered at the same time to the device in your hand.
One of the biggest challenges for broadcasters is going to be 4K, but it is a very demanding task to stream that content to consumers online.
TRP: Following the Winter OIympics, what do you expect to be the next event to attract high numbers of online video traffic?
JD: The 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. We keep seeing increasing interest in streaming sporting events to a wide range of devices and expect this event to be another leap forward.
Given the World Cup takes place over the course of a month it is going to be really interesting to see how the traffic patterns change across the group stages.
TRP: We are all using so many different devices these days to connect online. What affect is this having and how real is the 'situational performance problem'?
JD: One case no longer fits all. Previously content would be delivered to a PC screen and it would be optimised for a set screen resolution.
But you can no longer guarantee the device, OS, browser, screen size, connection method or speed. For brand managers the aim is always to deliver a consistent user and brand experience across all channels, but online this has been difficult leading to poor experiences and ultimately lost sales.
The problem can be addressed by solutions that allow a single device agnostic website to be dynamically optimised for every user request based on the device, connection, quality and browser. This helps the IT team and improves conversion rates and delivers and enhanced customer experience.
TRP: Looking back over the last ten years of Akamai, what are the most significant changes to the web that have affected organisations?
JD: In a nutshell cloud computing and ecommerce. If it is implemented correctly, cloud enables the efficiencies necessary to support an agile business, a mobile workforce and a global user base.
There are still concerns about performance and security, but equally, there are significant cost savings and operational efficiencies that are increasingly being recognised by enterprises.
Ecommerce is unrecognisable from ten years ago. It is now an essential tool for commercial businesses of all sizes, anywhere in the world, in order to communicate and sell to customers.
The importance now is that ecommerce has to reflect a company's brand, drive traffic and deliver a good experience. Like cloud computing it will continue to evolve.
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