Today's Dynamic Content Needs More
SaaS providers that rely on Internet performance include those delivering unified communications and collaboration, content collaboration including enterprise file sharing and synchronization, and those that enable content sharing for regulated industries. In many cases the lines between these types of applications are blurring over time as providers expand into adjacencies. Collaborative applications with rich interactive features that must deliver consistent performance for global end-users such as dynamic SaaS applications also have important delivery requirements. In addition, SaaS providers delivering big data ETL (extract, transform, load) tools include data analytics solutions that require timely transfer of very large files or logs.
SaaS providers need their data transfers to be delivered consistently fast, regardless of where their origin servers and end users might be in the world. As the SaaS customer base becomes more global, gaining control and visibility over inconsistent Internet backbone performance becomes more important.
Internet Backbone Problem Workarounds
This problem has not gone unnoticed over the years, and with no help in sight, SaaS providers have attempted to fix their Internet backbone problems by implementing expensive and complex workarounds, including building replicated data centers to improve performance for regional end users.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are distributed servers that deliver cached content to users based on their geographic location. CDNs are excellent for serving static content to users near a CDN's Point of Presence (PoP), but quickly become impractical for handling dynamic data. Some CDNs have built fiber backhaul networks between their PoPs to help refresh cache contents. These backhaul networks can be used to help accelerate uploads and bi-directional content, but these networks were optimized to refresh static data. They don't perform efficiently for accelerating today's dynamic content, and are entirely without value when the content is spontaneously generated, as in the case with real-time media like voice or video.
Some SaaS providers and most UCaaS providers create regional data centers to improve performance, locating PoPs in the geographies where users are experiencing poor performance. For example, if users in Sydney, Australia, are experiencing poor performance, the provider will either deploy an instance of its application to a Sydney cloud data center, or in some cases build out an entire data center itself. This approach works when the company can absorb the complexity and cost of deploying and running its own data centers and maintaining mechanisms to synchronize data across many distributed systems. Global customers demand that their applications work seamlessly across their business, and the business complexity of sharding an application to achieve this prevents SaaS providers from being able to roll out new features and technologies quickly.
A Real Solution
Leveraging Internet Overlay Networks is one approach that gives end users of SaaS providers sub-second application performance around the globe. They help to steer traffic around congested networks in the Internet backbone, delivering better performance and reducing the cost and complexity of application, storage, and networking infrastructure workarounds.
The leading Internet Overlay Networks leverage the surface area of public cloud providers to continuously monitor the global Internet backbone to find the fastest routes, avoiding congestion and overcoming the performance problems caused by least cost routing. In the process, they can improve data transfer performance by 10x or more. Advanced Internet Overlay Networks adapt dynamically to changing conditions and elastically scale up and down to align with SaaS providers' real-time traffic requirements, providing instant capacity where and when it's needed. It's delivered "as-a-service," so there is no hardware, no caching to configure, and no user software to download.
Conclusion
The Internet backbone's economics and protocols make it challenging for SaaS providers to deliver the user experience that their customers demand, particularly those that are located far from the application's data center. However, by better understanding why the Internet backbone problems exist, why potential workarounds fail to tackle the core problem, and how Internet Overlay Networks address the fundamental reasons why the Internet is slow, a SaaS provider can deliver a great application experience to all their users, located anywhere around the globe.
