Integrating the Silverline Managed Services Platform with a Content Delivery Network

The Challenge

Prioritizing cloud flexibility and choosing the best mix of services to deliver a seamless customer experience.

Organizations are challenged with how to adapt to continuously changing business conditions and operating environments. To efficiently and rapidly implement solutions that yield immediate operating results, quantified in both cost savings and customer satisfaction, internal teams must have the leeway and flexibility to select the best solutions to achieve internally defined goals.

When our customer, a global IT solutions provider, was transitioning to a new web content-management system they faced several challenges:

  1. How to best manage, promote and distribute up-to-date company content on their corporate website.
  2. How to ensure that the infrastructure and applications utilized would be continuously available to their customers.

Through an RFP process, the customer was able to evaluate multiple vendors to determine the best solution(s) to provide the most comprehensive content management strategy along with the best combination of security and performance.

Using this process, our customer selected a combination of services to construct a highly reliable, secure, and efficient network to manage content publishing on their corporate website.

Our customer built the solution based on the following requirements:

  • Provision multiple global edge nodes to distribute content to potential and existing customers worldwide.
  • Provide effective, local BGP paths to limit local requests to less than two hops for any given global region.
  • Perform local page download request times, and time to first byte at or near a time similar to a locally hosted solution.
  • Include a highly reliable, optimized, and secure network that has a managed web-application firewall, managed DDoS protection for both the network and the applications, fraud and bot detection and mitigation services for both desktop and mobile devices.
  • Enable functionality to manage the system via API endpoints for automation and microservices deployment, SIEM integration, SSO capabilities, and Role Based Access Control for all portal management.
  • Allow internal and external participants an easy and secure way to interact with the system, with minimum involvement from IT or other internal teams.

The Architectural Components

Selecting the most reliable network with the lowest operating costs per request

To maximize the investment value of the solution, our customer selected services that offered the best solution cost, based on user requests and ease of integration. They also considered the resources required to manage the solution long term and the impact to internal content managers and technical writers.

To achieve the goal of providing a consistent experience across its entire portfolio, our customer defined and selected an architecture based on the following products and services:

Managed Security Services

F5® Silverline Managed Services

    Web Application Firewall
    DDoS application and network protection 
    Fraud / Automated Threat / Bot protection 
    API system management endpoints
    SIEM integration SSO capabilities
    Role Based Access Control 
    Route Optimization
    Direct peering relationships with AWS, Azure, GCP

Content Management

    CMS
    Managed Services

Content Distribution and Storage

Amazon Web Services

    Amazon EC2
    Amazon ELB
    Amazon Route 53
    Amazon CloudFront
    Amazon S3

Web Metrics

Analytics Vendor

    User Analytics

The Solution

Developing an emerging brand strategy to streamline content and deliver a consistent experience for customers worldwide

Our customer recognized that the most important factors in developing a complete solution would be fast performance for content delivery to its own customers, edge security to protect valuable company assets and intellectual property, long-term cost savings and continuous service availability, and reduced maintenance and solution administration requirements.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture of the combined solution based on the components selected.

Fig 1

Figure 1: Seamless system integration for a frictionless customer experience

Key Outcomes

Performance, scalability, and system availability

Serving content efficiently to customers is a priority for any organization. Our customer analyzed the network peering of both F5 Silverline and AWS to ensure their customers would have continuous content and service availability and the fastest browser downloads globally. With F5 Silverline direct peering connectivity to AWS, our customer was able to realize considerable improvements in performance and content delivery. Figures 2 and 3 show the global peering maps for both F5 Silverline and AWS.

Fig 2

Figure 2: F5 Silverline - Global Data Centers

Fig 3

Figure 3: AWS Global Regions

Edge Security

Cost of Operation

Compared to other solutions evaluated by our customer, the selected architecture offers considerable cost savings. With a managed service, the team does not have to manage the infrastructure and security aspects of the system. They can concentrate on providing a smooth publishing experience for contributors, ensuring that current and relevant published content is immediately available to their target customers.

Fig 4

Figure 4: F5 Silverline Managed Security Services

Cost of Operation

Compared to other solutions evaluated by our customer, the selected architecture offers considerable cost savings. With a managed service, the team does not have to manage the infrastructure and security aspects of the system. They can concentrate on providing a smooth publishing experience for contributors, ensuring that current and relevant published content is immediately available to their target customers.

Conclusion

The customer experience has always been important. Today, however, worldwide changes are having a growing impact on how and when customers consume information. Organizations must adapt quickly to these changes to show that they understand and care about their customers' evolving needs.

Internal operations, IT, marketing, sales, and engineering teams are being challenged to reduce friction in the consumption of content and deliver a consistently available and easy-to-consume experience. Our customer's teams chose F5 Silverline and Amazon CloudFront for flexibility in scaling computing and bandwidth resources, the ability of both architectures to allow rapid integration with third-party components, continuous security and threat mitigation, and around-the-clock availability. The teams can now focus on the most important component of this solution; generating valuable and relevant content to drive user engagement.