Arirang TV, a leading global broadcaster in Korea, faced challenges in providing high-quality video streaming to its overseas users, who represented 85% of total web visitors. The poor network environment made it difficult for these users to watch videos properly. Moreover, the rise in popularity of various devices changed the environment for watching broadcasts, increasing demand for ‘Full Contents Review’ and the expected level of quality. Arirang needed to create an environment where viewers could watch programs smoothly on PCs, mobile devices, and smart TVs, not just via satellite.

Bang & Olufsen, a global design icon and symbol of audio-visual excellence, was seeking to leverage a robust online presence to serve both mid-level and high-end customers in the world’s fastest growing consumer markets, particularly China. However, the company experienced slow response time on their websites, and in some instances, the website was failing to load. Despite testing the use of data centres located in Singapore and Hong Kong, these failed to meet the company's goal of creating a strong experience for mainland China consumers. The company needed a global solution that would ensure a strong local and global online experience when building a data centre was not an option.

Ekino, a FullSIX Group company, hosts websites for its customers that must meet demanding technical specifications, such as fast page load times for users anywhere in the world. Some of Ekino’s customers have websites with large amounts of content, or have servers that are located far from where users connect to their websites. To serve these customers effectively, Ekino relies on CDNetworks’ content acceleration technology. CDNetworks’ technology can not only speed display times for web applications, but also reduce the amount of data that must be transferred from the original servers. As a result, customers save money on their internet service provider (ISP) costs and get greater capacity. For example, the large French car maker had a website that needed to be easily accessible from far-off countries like Brazil and Russia.

Square Enix, a leading gaming company in Japan, was facing challenges in providing a stable network infrastructure for online gaming. The company was using several CDN vendors concurrently to ensure service continuity. However, using multiple CDN vendors was costly, and the company was looking for ways to reduce these costs. They formed an interdepartmental professional team with the goal of reducing CDN costs. Every year, the Square Enix CDN team compares current vendors and other vendors including those outside Japan. To provide gamers with the best environment that uses cutting-edge and high-quality service, vendors are compared and replaced annually.

Infernum Productions AG, an international online games publisher and developer, faced a challenge with their fantasy MMORPG “Dragon’s Prophet”. The game required users to download and install an approximately 10 GB data packet prior to playing. Even with relatively fast data connections, download times often reached up to 4 hours. This long waiting period tested the patience of many users, often resulting in the interruption of the download and negative comments in the Gamer forums. The transfer speed and conversion rate (the ratio between downloads and actual game registrations) required significant optimisation to expand the gaming community, especially in the key geographical regions of Germany, France, Great Britain and Poland.

In April 2012, Innisfree entered the Chinese market to capitalise on the growth potential by winning over prospective buyers. Before opening its first store in Shanghai and while planning for the launch of their Chinese website, Innisfree examined how it could best provide a seamless online shopping experience for customers. The objective of the Chinese website was to deliver the same customer experience as the Korean website. To achieve this, the brand had the following requirements: First, fast loading was essential because a slow loading time could result in a rapid increase in the bounce rate for visitors. Second, the brand needed a system environment capable of flexibly responding to high user traffic, for example, during a promotion on the website. The third requirement was for full technical support and website maintenance to be provided. It was essential that full technical support be made readily available for any request once the service was adopted.

Saxo Bank, a leading international investment bank, was facing a challenge with its online trading and investment platform, SaxoTrader, in China. The demand from investors and institutions within China to access the SaxoTrader platform grew significantly, and so did the need for accelerating the performance of the application in China. The latency caused by the distance between the Denmark-based datacentre and China, along with China’s vast geography and complex Internet peering, resulted in slower performance. Fast transaction times are critical to stock, bond, and foreign exchange trading. As little as one second can result in lost revenue from incomplete or incorrect trades based on out-of-date market information. Saxo Bank also wanted to ensure the same customer experience in China that the SaxoTrader platform is known for around the world. Saxo Bank quickly realised that doing business in China needed a different approach.

edict egaming, a provider of online gaming platforms, was facing significant bandwidth usage costs due to the billing system of local Internet providers on the Isle of Man, which is based on actual data volumes rather than flat rates. This meant that every megabyte transmitted was billed to the customer. With its growing number of users, edict egaming was incurring an average five-figure amount per month in bandwidth costs alone. Additionally, data transmission capacity was stretched to the limit at times, particularly during peak hours. The company sought to significantly reduce monthly data volume and therefore make considerable savings.

iOffer, an online marketplace, was facing challenges in delivering dynamic applications and content to international locations due to inherent packet loss and latency of the internet. This resulted in slow download times and page load times in excess of three seconds, especially for international users who accounted for more than fifty percent of the site’s visitors each month. The company wanted to improve the delivery of dynamic applications and content to international locations and stand behind its sub-one second performance goal without affecting the bottom line or forcing iOffer to raise its prices. The company considered building an additional data center closer to international site visitors to enhance dynamic website performance, but it was deemed prohibitively expensive.

IPM Group, a Belgian media company, faced challenges with their high-traffic websites. The company's websites needed to be visually appealing, easy to navigate, fast, and reliable. They also had to handle unexpected traffic spikes, such as after significant news events. The company's existing IT infrastructure was designed for static, text-based content, which resulted in slow page load times and occasional unavailability. The company needed a solution that could improve page load times and manage traffic spikes without incurring prohibitive costs.

JCB, a pioneer in the credit card business in Japan, was facing challenges with internet latency and low availability that impacted their web content delivery to China. The sudden termination of their China web server infrastructure by the local ISP was a painful learning experience for them. They considered a policy change swiftly. There was a risk that a similar situation would occur if they worked with another similar ISP in China. As such, they decided to set up their web server in Japan to serve the China market while still having the web speed and stability of content delivery as a key area of consideration.

MYmovies.it, the second most visited video entertainment website in Italy, was looking to become a major Internet reference portal. This required the use of state-of-the-art technology to deliver a high volume of relevant content in a technologically advanced manner. The company was constantly experimenting with and implementing new solutions, tools, and products to improve and expand its premium quality services. However, the company faced the challenge of improving website performance without increasing investments in bandwidth or making changes to its existing infrastructure. MYmovies.it was looking for a single provider of caching and streaming services that could rapidly implement a higher-performance and easier-to-use solution than it had been used to. It also sought a partner that was passionately focused on the end user experience.

Tourism Victoria, the Victorian Government’s lead tourism agency, was looking to expand its reach into strategic growth markets, particularly China and the millions of Chinese speakers around the world. They planned a two-phase, multi-million dollar online and off-line promotional campaign in China. However, they recognized that site performance and availability issues could arise within mainland China due to the country's variable Internet infrastructure and network peering. Additionally, the cost to host visitmelbourne.com in multiple datacentres in each target market would have been prohibitively expensive. Moreover, Australia’s geographic isolation from the rest of the world can add 100-200 milliseconds of latency between origin servers in Australia and international visitors.

As TuneUp Software GmbH expanded its customer base, latency became an issue for customers located outside of Europe. The company's business model, which is based on selling over the web, required optimising the user experience and speeding up download times. The physical distance between the server and the customer location was found to have a significant impact on performance. The company's web servers were under a lot of strain, with sub-optimal speeds and high latency levels. The company also noticed an increasing bounce rate, with users leaving the site after visiting a single page. This was particularly concerning as the company was expanding into international markets.

Jabra, a global provider of audio headsets, was facing challenges with its growing international presence and sales opportunities. The company needed to ensure that its website was always accessible in all parts of the world, no matter how remote from its native Denmark. Key target markets for growth included Hong Kong, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and China. Jabra needed its website to load very quickly in these regions to maintain its reputation with potential customers and prevent site abandonment. The company was using a content delivery network to achieve better load times and “time to interaction”, but found that it did not have the international reach it needed, billing was unpredictable, and its support was lacking. There were also particular challenges when targeting China due to strict content filtering, often resulting in high latencies.

As Hostelworld’s global footprint rapidly grew in terms of its customers and properties, especially in the Asia Pacific region, it found that the performance of its website outside of Western Europe was becoming increasingly important. It soon became clear that users outside of Western Europe were often experiencing a lag effect when viewing the content online. With Hostelworld’s main website being hosted in its primary data centres in Dublin and London, customers situated further afield didn’t experience the same level of site performance. In order to deliver the best possible experience for its global customers, Hostelworld needed to ensure that its website performed equally as fast across the various continents and devices.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is a global leader in the protection of human rights, with 400 employees operating from offices on 5 continents. The HRW website is critical to the organization's success, as it allows them to disseminate information about human rights abuses worldwide. However, the website is occasionally targeted by individuals, governments, and organizations that aim to obstruct HRW's efforts. These attackers often employ denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. While HRW had the ability to manually mitigate these attacks, the process was time-consuming and disruptive, requiring the immediate attention of HRW's two-person technical web team and preventing the organization's 70 content creators and publishers from performing their critical web-related tasks. Furthermore, the HRW website could not process online donations during an attack, as it consumed all server resources.

Agent Provocateur, a premium British lingerie retailer, was facing a challenge with its global online footprint. As the company expanded, site latency became an issue, particularly for customers outside the UK, including those in the US, China, and Australia. Localized webpages were taking too long to load, a problem that was exacerbated during peak shopping times and sales. The company realized that to attract new customers and grow in its key target markets, it needed to ensure that it wasn’t compromising on its website performance. Deploying multiple locally hosted sites would be too complicated and require significant resources, leading the company to decide that a content delivery network partner would provide the best solution.

AREP, a subsidiary of France’s national railway operator SNCF, is an engineering firm involved in all aspects of modern urban architecture. It was founded in 1997 by two architects and engineers, Jean-Marie Duthilleul and Etienne Tricaud, to design urban spaces for not only large metropolitan areas, but also individual districts, neighbourhoods, and streets. The company is known for its skills in designing multimodal railway stations offering a wide array of mobility services for busy travellers. Building these types of structures in dense urban areas requires overcoming major technical challenges while respecting the constraints of what are often heritage sites. Today AREP leverages that know-how to develop effective solutions for other types of urban spaces. With 700 employees from over 30 different countries, AREP’s experts include architects, urban planners, designers, engineers, economists, programmers, project managers, and more. Its engineering and construction projects range from multimodal hubs, railway stations, and other public areas to offices, hotels, housing, shopping centres, and technical facilities.

King Jouet, a major toy retailer, operates an e-commerce website that experiences a significant surge in traffic during the holiday season. The number of page views increases by a factor of eight in November-December, with sales during the first ten days of December equivalent to the entire month of January. The company needed a solution to manage these seasonal traffic spikes without investing in additional servers. Previously, King Jouet had used another content delivery network, but it was costly.

Wistia, a video marketing platform provider, faced challenges in delivering high-quality video content to its rapidly growing customer base worldwide, especially in the Asia Pacific region. The company's strategy of leveraging different service providers' strengths for redundant systems and operations was hindered by the high cost of data center hosting and uneven content delivery network performance in the Asia Pacific region. Wistia needed a solution that could provide robust and cost-efficient platform delivery to a global audience, with a particular focus on improving service quality in the Asia Pacific region.

Yatedo, a French start-up formed in 2009, is a search engine that specializes in people searches and online reputation. With more than 5 million unique visitors per month and traffic coming mainly from the United States, Yatedo was experiencing recurrent slowdowns of information synchronization and display, which had a negative impact on user experience. This is because Yatedo’s server is currently based in France, at a great distance from potential internet users located, for example, on the West Coast of the United States.

CanalChat Grandialogue, a leading provider of online chat services for special events, faced the challenge of delivering continuously-updated content to all participants of a given chat. The content is usually disseminated from the customer’s premises, which leads to two challenges: one, mitigating the effects to the customer’s internal bandwidth when its on-site employees connect to the discussion; and two, keeping the chat running smoothly when employees at other sites throughout the world connect. The company needed a solution that could handle all these requirements. They were looking for a provider flexible enough to offer a system that could be adapted to their customers’ various specifications.

Imperia Online, a real-time strategy game, requires quick responses from its players and instant feedback for them to build their empire and direct their armies. Without a fast response time from the server, a game like Imperia can quickly become unplayable, as players are unable to quickly respond to threats from their neighbours or launch their own attacks at the right time. There are markets where browser-based free-to-play games are especially popular – such as Russia and Brazil – where poor performance was becoming a real issue, making it challenging for users to enjoy the real-time gaming experience. Russia and Brazil’s internet infrastructure means that games that demand high performance do not always work as intended. For Imperia Online, which wants its customers to be highly invested and spend a lot of time with the game, poor performance is untenable – but its previous CDN provider was not able to guarantee performance in these areas.

SpotOption, a leading provider of trading software, was facing latency issues with its platform in China due to the country's poor network infrastructure and the Great Firewall of China. Despite engaging a content delivery network (CDN) provider to speed up the service in all markets, performance issues remained in China. As exchange rates change so quickly, online traders expect the platform to be fast, reliable and responsive or they will abandon the service. SpotOption’s service was especially at risk because traders use binary option platforms in expiry times as short as 15 seconds. It was essential that prices were displayed in real-time to avoid the risk of arbitrage, where traders take advantage of price differences between platforms, which can cause losses that are damaging to the business. SpotOption needed a CDN provider that could accelerate content both inside and outside of China.

Knight Frank, a global real estate agency, was facing challenges with its website performance. Clients in some parts of the world, notably Australia and the UAE, were experiencing slower loading times when accessing their respective websites. This was undermining Knight Frank's brand, which is built upon delivering the highest quality standards. The company also faced issues with its website in Asia, particularly in China, where it was unable to deliver a fast and reliable service to users. This was making it difficult for Knight Frank to penetrate the Chinese market. The company identified that the physical distance that data had to travel was the cause of latency. In addition to this, Knight Frank was also faced with the risk of being hacked and the challenge of mitigating DDoS attacks.

The customer is a Chinese Internet finance and insurance company that uses Oracle's cloud service for its ERP business. However, there are no OracleCloud service nodes in China at present, which means users in Mainland China may encounter some problems when trying to access the OracleCloud servers that are located overseas. This includes slow access speeds, which can negatively impact the company's business operations.

Online gaming companies are faced with the challenge of maintaining a consistently exceptional user experience to keep global gamers engaged. Any less than perfect performance can lead to frustration among gamers and drive them to other platforms. Issues such as poor network connections, lag times, jitter, and downtime can negatively impact the gaming experience, especially when the games are getting faster, richer, and more interactive. High utilization of server resources, high IT costs, and the need to safeguard against cyber security threats place a heavy strain on gaming providers. These factors make it increasingly difficult for online gaming companies to acquire and retain customers, offer new products and features that customers will pay for, and sustain revenue growth. Gaming is among the most demanding applications due to its sheer volume of data, transactions, and number of simultaneous users.

Bally, a Swiss luxury leather goods brand, was among the first high-end brands to realize the potential of the increasingly affluent Chinese market. Since launching the first shop in Hong Kong in 1978 and Beijing in 1986, Bally has expanded its presence in the country to 60, with 51 boutiques in mainland China and 9 in Hong Kong. To further capitalize on the business opportunities in the country, Bally introduced a dedicated Chinese website, www.bally.cn, in 2011. The website, featuring high-resolution images and videos of Bally’s high-end shoes, handbags, and accessories, brings the company’s trademark products to the fingertips of China’s growing population of high-income earners. Despite the opportunities offered by the Chinese market, e-commerce in the country poses a few challenges too. Due to the 'Great Firewall' implemented by the Chinese government, companies such as Bally need to be aware of its restrictions and localize their content, not only regarding language but also photography and site layout. Chinese geography can also prove problematic. Despite a high level of Internet penetration in the biggest cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, there are areas where telecommunications infrastructure is in need of an upgrade to meet the demands of the growing digital economy. China’s Internet infrastructure has limited peering points and fragmented network topology, which can result in patchy connectivity and slow page download speeds for web users.

HighQ, a leading provider of secure document exchange and social collaboration software, faced a challenge when its customers, including a major international law firm, began to roll out HighQ’s collaboration platform to their overseas offices. Users outside of Europe were experiencing high latency when accessing the application, leading to a slowdown in web page loading and document transfer speeds, especially during peak business hours. HighQ considered hosting in multiple local data centres to achieve optimal performance for users in the US and Australia. However, the time and resource required to establish similar data centre infrastructure overseas made this strategy unrealistic.