eCDN: How to Stream Enterprise Video at Scale

The rapid transition to remote and hybrid work environments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic created new challenges and opportunities for today’s enterprises. As workplace communications moved to video, many enterprises found it difficult to support increased traffic on their corporate networks.

Enterprise content delivery networks (eCDNs) enable companies to support their employees’ video streaming habits and take full advantage of the move to hybrid work models.

At the most basic and fundamental level, an eCDN adds software or hardware to an enterprise network to help manage and optimize the distribution of bandwidth-intensive media such as video. To put it simply, an eCDN lightens the burden of this kind of data on the corporate network.

An eCDN intelligently routes the flow of video traffic around the network to improve performance and reduce or eliminate congestion. It does this by reducing the number of connections to the origin video source while still enabling all users to retrieve the video — either live or on demand — when requested.

With an eCDN, you can deliver unlimited, high-quality streaming video on your corporate network and save network capacity for business-critical operations. In addition, your audiences enjoy less latency and buffering, faster video start times and a higher quality, more reliable viewing experience.

Why Do You Need an eCDN?

The growing use of video brings your IT department—and your corporate network—a whole new set of challenges.

Video uses a lot of bandwidth, and the higher the quality or the more interactive it is, the more bandwidth it consumes. But most corporate networks aren’t sized to handle hundreds or thousands of video streams at once.

Streaming video can wreak havoc on your corporate network. Without an eCDN, every single viewer requests the video from the content source—often in the cloud—which can overload the firewall and slow the network.

As a result, network capacity, consumption, and scalability become issues, especially over WAN links and Wi-Fi networks with limited bandwidth. There’s a very real possibility that video will jeopardize the delivery of higher priority information and transactional data.

Unlike other network traffic, video is particularly sensitive to and visibly affected by network latency, packet loss and jitter. The result is a low and inconsistent quality viewing experience, with buffering and reliability issues, that can lead to frustration and a lack of confidence in using video for important communications.

To alleviate these problems without inhibiting the use of video, IT can deploy an eCDN.

How eCDNs Benefit Today’s Enterprises

The transition to remote and hybrid work environments has introduced unforeseen challenges to enterprises that eCDNs are designed to solve. People spent a significant amount of time during the pandemic using video communication tools for entertainment and social engagement, and they’ve brought those new habits to the workplace. Companies need to have the network infrastructure in place to support vastly increased video usage without crashing their networks.

This is especially true for hybrid companies that typically manage downsized office spaces but can’t account for the number of people who may or may not choose to use the corporate network on any given day. Their needs are a moving target, as their networks have to be able to support an undefined number of video users no matter where in the world they might be located (whether in the office or not). eCDNs help enterprises ensure they have the bandwidth to support video streaming regardless of whether users are tuning in from inside or outside their corporate networks.

Some of the benefits today’s enterprises can experience when using eCDN solutions include:

• Seamless video streaming experiences: eCDNs give users spread across the world easy access to your video streams without causing buffering issues, or worse, crashing your networks. This ensures executives are able to share important information about the company, employees can engage in video training, and teams can collaborate over video.

• Enhanced user engagement: Video is essential to creating a sense of community in a distributed work environment. eCDNs ensure you’re able to create high-quality video experiences in your workplace, helping you take advantage of the employee engagement benefits that come with it and engendering a cohesive spirit among your workforce.

• Facilitate the growth of your workforce: High-quality video streaming experiences supported by an eCDN solution enable employees to plug into your organization from virtually anywhere in the world. That means your enterprise is able to access the most experienced talent regardless of their location, facilitating your growth and success.

Why Not Just Use a CDN?

Most CDNs — which are used to distribute video over the public internet — are designed and optimized to provide a better experience for extremely large numbers of viewers. In most cases, the density of viewers in close proximity to one another is very low.
When it comes to enterprise streaming, it’s the complete opposite. You will most likely have fewer viewers, but they are in close proximity to one another (i.e., in the same building). The characteristics that make some technologies excellent for CDN may not work in the enterprise simply because of the differences in scale and density.

The distinction in audience size and density impacts the performance and level of optimization you can achieve with the different kinds of CDN technologies. Something that optimizes bandwidth well for public internet traffic may still produce too much bandwidth burden on the average corporate internet connection and WAN links.

But maybe the most important difference between the two is the level of security. CDNs are typically commercially owned and shared by hundreds or thousands of companies and users. An eCDN brings video distribution behind the firewall, allowing you to control video distribution while securing your company’s proprietary content.

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer streaming enables live video communications between individuals operating on different browsers. Our peer-to-peer solution offering is a WebRTC-based solution that’s available out of the box and requires no additional software or hardware components.

There are far fewer administrative functions required to implement our peer-to-peer solutions, making it easy and convenient for businesses that need to quickly implement an eCDN.

Because it is browser-enabled and require no centralized administrative support, our peer-to-peer solution is especially useful to remote organizations that don’t have a central corporate network or that can’t leverage effective management over their video communications.

Multicasting

Multicasting is a form of video streaming in which copies of a single video stream are made and sent to multiple devices simultaneously. Video distribution takes place over several routers inside the enterprise network, helping to prevent the corporate network from being overwhelmed during large broadcasts. This is in contrast to unicast streaming, which requires all video files to individually move across the network for each viewer.

Our multicasting solution takes a single video stream and distributes it to an ecosystem of routers and switches, giving system administrators control over who can access the live stream while minimizing bandwidth usage. Multicasting is especially useful for large networks that need to support an enormous volume of users, like a corporate headquarters.

Edge caching

Our edge caching solution is based on our proprietary Distributed Media Engine (DME). It enables on-demand video streaming support for remote and hybrid workers across large spaces to prevent corporate networks from crashing. Edge DMEs store video data where it becomes accessible to local users for download and consumption.

While edge caching requires purpose-built devices capable of making video file copies, the benefits for the enterprise are significant. Organizations that have enormous libraries of on-demand videos are better able to manage those videos and ensure quality access to users wherever they are located. This is especially true for hybrid enterprises with an undefined number of people trying to access video content.

How to Choose an eCDN Type

Each eCDN technology has unique strengths and weaknesses. Choosing a single solution will not optimally meet the needs of most enterprises, and doing so will require compromises that may or may not prove to be difficult to manage. A far better approach is to deploy the right eCDN for the right business problem, and this changes by use case and location within an enterprise.

The Vbrick advantage

Our eCDN solutions give enterprises access to the above eCDN models based on your requirements. Whether you are a completely remote enterprise in need of video communications for a distributed workforce or you’re a hybrid or fully on-site organization with unspecified daily network support needs, our eCDN solutions can be tailored to match your specific enterprise requirements.

Moreover, our eCDN solutions are interoperable, meaning you can integrate multiple technologies and take advantage of the benefits of each one for different applications. For example, while peer-to-peer streaming is typically used for live video streaming, you can pair it with our edge devices to further reduce ingress and enable better video and network performance, particularly for viewing on-demand video.

No matter your enterprise video requirements, your partners at Vbrick will take the time to understand your business challenges and craft a customized eCDN solution that’s right for you.