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What is a CDN?

What is a CDN?

For this week’s Tuesday with Tim, I wanted to explain what a CDN is and why it matters in the context of business continuity and cybersecurity. In short, a CDN, a content delivery network, is a way to distribute website information, videos, and content that run on all major websites. A prime example of this is Netflix. They don’t have a server centrally located for everyone to access. Instead, they are a delivery network, so all their content is readily available on the internet that is closest to your location. By delivering content in this fashion, it reduces the congestion of the network and makes the access faster for all the systems.  

The reason why this is important is because CDN’s are used heavily by a lot of major and minor websites on the internet. They are also important because just within the past 10 days, two content delivery services, Akamai Technologies and Fastly, both had outages. If CDN’s have a problem, that is a point of failure on the internet, and in turn that would prevent access to people getting information. Therefore, it is important that these companies have robust redundancy as well as the proper cybersecurity measures in place. If a threat actor decided they wanted to go after one of these CDNs, they could halt access to the internet for an extended period of time. 

To read more about CDNs and the current events that recently unfolded click below:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/09/tech/fastly-cdn-internet-risk/index.html