CDN (Content Delivery Network)

The invisible infrastructure that makes or breaks customer experience — and why milliseconds translate directly into revenue. By 2026, the global CDN market has exceeded $28 billion, driven by the explosive growth of video streaming, e-commerce, and AI-powered applications. Amazon has calculated that every 100 milliseconds of latency costs 1% in sales — a figure that, at Amazon's scale, represents billions of dollars annually. For any organisation with a digital presence, a CDN is not an optional performance optimisation; it is a fundamental business requirement that directly affects customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and ultimately, revenue.

What It Is

A Content Delivery Network is a globally distributed network of servers that delivers digital content — web pages, images, videos, application data — to users based on their geographic location. Imagine a chain of warehouses: instead of shipping every product from a single central depot (which would take days for distant customers), you stock regional warehouses across the country so that every customer receives their order from the nearest location. A CDN does exactly this for digital content. Without a CDN, a user in Tokyo accessing a website hosted on a server in London experiences round-trip latency of approximately 200–300 milliseconds due to the physical distance data must travel. With a CDN, that same request is served from a Tokyo-based edge server, reducing latency to under 20 milliseconds. This ten-fold improvement is immediately perceptible to users and has measurable effects on engagement, bounce rates, and conversion. Modern CDNs do far more than static content caching. They provide dynamic content acceleration, edge computing capabilities (running code at the edge), real-time video streaming optimisation, DDoS protection, web application firewalls, and SSL/TLS termination. Leading CDNs now process and transform content at the edge — resizing images, personalising pages, and even running AI inference — before delivering it to the end user.

Why It Matters for Business

The relationship between page load speed and business outcomes is well-documented. Google reports that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load. Walmart found that improving page load time by one second increased conversions by 2%. For an e-commerce company generating $1 billion in annual online revenue, a one-second improvement could mean an additional $20 million in sales — achievable primarily through CDN deployment. Beyond performance, CDNs are critical for reliability and security. When a viral marketing campaign drives a 10x traffic spike, origin servers alone typically buckle under the load. A CDN absorbs this spike by distributing it across thousands of edge servers, maintaining availability even during traffic surges. During the 2025 Black Friday period, Cloudflare reported handling peak traffic of 74 million requests per second — a volume that would overwhelm any single data centre. CDNs also reduce bandwidth costs significantly. By serving cached content from edge servers, organisations can reduce origin server bandwidth consumption by 60–80%, translating to substantial savings on cloud egress fees. For media-heavy businesses, this alone can justify CDN investment many times over.

Enterprise Use Cases

Netflix, which accounts for approximately 15% of global downstream internet traffic, operates its own CDN called Open Connect. By deploying purpose-built caching appliances directly inside internet service provider (ISP) data centres worldwide, Netflix delivers 4K video with minimal buffering to over 300 million subscribers. This custom CDN infrastructure saves Netflix an estimated $1 billion annually in bandwidth costs compared to using commercial CDN services. The BBC uses a multi-CDN strategy combining Akamai, Cloudfront, and other providers to deliver iPlayer content to 20 million daily viewers. During major events like the FIFA World Cup, the BBC's CDN architecture handles simultaneous streams from over 5 million concurrent viewers with sub-two-second startup times. The multi-CDN approach provides both capacity redundancy and competitive pricing leverage. SaaS giant Salesforce relies on CDNs to deliver its CRM application interface to over 150,000 enterprise customers globally. By caching static assets and accelerating API responses at the edge, Salesforce maintains sub-200-millisecond page load times for users on every continent, a critical factor in user adoption and productivity for enterprise applications.

Vendor Landscape

Cloudflare dominates the CDN market with approximately 30% share, serving over 20 million customers from 320+ data centres across 120+ countries. Its enterprise plans start at approximately $5,000 per month, with custom pricing for large deployments. Akamai, the pioneer of CDN technology, holds roughly 25% of the enterprise market and is particularly strong in media delivery and security, with pricing typically ranging from $3,000 to $50,000+ per month. Fastly differentiates with its edge computing platform and sub-millisecond cache purging, favoured by media and real-time application providers, with enterprise pricing starting around $5,000 per month. Amazon CloudFront is the default choice for AWS-heavy organisations, offering pay-as-you-go pricing with no minimum commitments. Google Cloud CDN and Microsoft Azure CDN serve their respective cloud ecosystems, with competitive pricing for intra-cloud workloads. In 2026, the CDN market is projected to grow to $35 billion, reflecting the increasing demand for high-performance content delivery solutions.

Strategic Considerations

Deploy a CDN for any customer-facing digital property, without exception. The question is not whether to use a CDN, but which architecture best fits your needs. Consider a multi-CDN strategy if your business depends on high-availability content delivery — for example, live streaming, global SaaS applications, or e-commerce platforms serving multiple continents. Multi-CDN provides redundancy and allows real-time traffic routing to ensure optimal performance during peak usage times.