FIs Turn To Edge Cloud Computing For High Speed, Low Cost Content Delivery

Company websites and apps today are expected to deliver robust real-time digital capabilities for users — and this requires technical infrastructure that is efficient, cost-effective and scalable. Over the past year and a half, the surge in online engagement has only raised the stakes for delivering consistently exceptional digital experiences.

How can companies meet these dual challenges of performance and efficiency? Scalable Performance: How To Lower The Costs Of High-Performance Digital Experiences, a collaboration with Fastly, examines how forward-thinking companies can utilize edge cloud technology in specific-use cases to cut costs and speed innovation. Central to this new approach are “edge cloud” platforms, which sit between a company’s origin server and the end user to process, serve and secure customers’ applications as close to end users as possible — at the edge of the internet.

Computing from the edge of the centralized cloud makes it easier for products to perform quickly at scale, regardless of where an app or platform request originates. Workloads run in locations that are closer to users, wherever they are, making it possible for developers to create efficient, cost-effective products that remain robust in performance, even amid traffic spikes. That means that edge computing may help rein in egress fees and network transit costs when configured well. Edge computing could also help reduce the load on an origin server and, by extension, lower the costs of infrastructure and security on the back end of a platform or app.

The inherent advantages of edge cloud platforms start with caching. Legacy content delivery networks (CDNs) typically have an artificially low cache hit ratio, as most are unable to cache dynamic, rapidly changing content. This may lead to higher latency rates, and remedying latency issues may drive up costs. Using a data hosting provider could result in a charge to facilitate the call and a charge to serve it. Edge cloud platforms can help companies avoid cost surges when traffic spikes cause latency issues.

See related: Fastly Says Edge Cloud Computing Is Best Way For FIs To Get Up Close And Personal

These differences are manifested clearly in how sites deal with an essential component of site engagement, dashboards and product onboarding: images. However, these can be expensive to host, store, process, transform, and deliver with conventional content delivery systems. A cost-effective way to simplify image delivery is to offload image transformation to the edge. The ability to detect visitor attributes such as device type, connection type and geolocation at the edge makes for faster image transformation decisions.

To learn more about how edge cloud technology can provide a crucial edge to companies’ online platforms, download the playbook.