Why Service and Support are Key to a Seamless CDN/Multi-CDN Onboarding Experience

In today’s highly competitive globally-connected world, many enterprises are considering migrating to a bigger CDN or adding additional CDNs to achieve the necessary online performance, reach, reliability, security and scale required to grow their business. But for many enterprises, the thought of migrating to or adding a new CDN seems impossible because they are either entrenched with their current delivery provider or unsure how to add to their current solution. In this blog, we’ll review our service and support teams’ process to ensure a seamless migration or addition of our CDN to your business.

‍5 steps to a seamless CDN onboarding experience

‍The good news is that changing your delivery provider or adding a CDN to your delivery workflow doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, with the right delivery partner and experienced service and technical support teams on your side, it can be a lot easier than you think. At Verizon Media, our service and technical support engineers have years of experience migrating customers to our CDN, assisting with delivery of select sites or properties, and helping customers include us as part of a multi-CDN strategy. Our expert technical support and service teams ensure a seamless transition regardless of your use case. Here is how we make it easy to work with our content delivery network.

1. Scoping the project: We know every customer, and their content is unique. In this initial stage, our engineering team’s focus is to become meticulously familiar with your specific business needs, timeline and success criteria.
   
   1. Our team applies a list of best practices, including edge cases we have seen from working with various customers across various industries. For example, in the case of multi-CDN, we recommend customers set as much of the caching/behavior logic on their origin as possible to reduce multi-CDN vendor control complexities.
2. Configuration: One benefit of having a flexible and compatible delivery platform is that we can sync to your specific configuration. Our goal is to establish 100% feature parity.
   
   1. For highly complex configurations, we employ Lua scripting to implement customized edge-side logic or behaviors.
   2. Support for Edge Side Includes (ESI) allows for assembling dynamic content at the edge of the network to improve performance and availability.
3. Testing: Once our engineering teams have validated the configuration, including performing quality assurance and other tests, it is handed off to you to conduct operational tests certifying that all the configurations are behaving as expected and meeting the success criteria.
4. Customer acceptance and operational handoff: We’re not happy until you’re happy. Once you confirm that the network is delivering your content as expected, our engineering team will hand control over to your operations teams.
   
   1. We believe in transparency. As part of the handoff, we equip you with all necessary documentation and escalation procedures.
   2. You’re never alone. Our service and support engineers are available 24 x 7 x 365 to assist you with any issue and are located in five support centers worldwide.
5. Tuning: A core philosophy of our engineering teams is continuous improvement. They are always tuning the network to ensure it’s delivering your content with the best possible performance, reliability and security.
   1. Our engineering teams have developed state-of-the-art, proactive monitoring and alerting tools designed to identify trends early before they become problems. This ongoing refinement maximizes your online performance, ensuring you are always delivering the best user experience.

Use case examples

‍Full migration
Our service and support engineering team recently worked with a large enterprise customer in the logistics industry who needed to migrate dozens of high-traffic, high-value web properties to our platform. This customer faced contractual deadline challenges that compressed the timeline to complete the migration. Despite this, our project team’s extensive experience onboarding large, complex customers and our rigorous practices and flexible platform tools enabled them to meet timelines and complete a successful migration. Additionally, the engineering team implemented business process improvements to our customer’s cloud security and live and on-demand video workflows. By conducting a phased migration to our platform, the customer drove significant costs out of their business, increased performance, and experienced minimal disruption to their operations.

Multi-CDN
A global e-commerce customer recently added our CDN to their multi-CDN strategy. The customer uses a sophisticated decisioning system to load balance traffic to the best-performing CDN on a regional basis. Speed was their priority, but they also required a CDN that could compete on price and ease of use. After reviewing their requirements, our engineering support teams integrated our Real-Time Log Delivery (RTLD) service with their reporting and traffic management systems. This setup provides deep analytical insight into our global performance on a real-time basis and has been critical to ensuring effective traffic decisioning. RTLD provides detailed and accurate information to the customer at all times, enabling them to leverage the scale and performance of our Media Platform to improve results across several key geographic areas.

‍Conclusion

‍As internet usage continues to grow, consumer demand for fast, secure websites and applications on every device is also increasing. Whether your content is images, video, audio, or data, you need to future-proof your online presence with a better CDN or multiple CDNs. Adding capacity is only one part of the solution. You also need experienced technical service and support to plan, implement and continuously improve your online experience to ensure users receive a great experience regardless of where they are or the amount of data traffic they are generating. At Verizon Media, you can rest assured our service and support teams will build a custom configuration tuned to your content, subscriber footprint and infrastructure. Our teams have deep experience in standing up and optimizing high-performance web applications and will configure and test your systems to ensure everything delivers to your exact specifications.

‍Connect with us today to learn how our expert service and support teams can help you future-proof your online presence.