Egnyte Fast Facts:
Customers
include
RedBull, Steve Madden, Sargent’s
Total
customers
22K in 112 countries
Global
presence
7 offices in 6 timezones
Industry
awards
Gartner, G2, PC Mag
About Egnyte
The Global Network Connectivity Challenge
Egnyte’s global customers naturally expected a consistent level of service for all their users, and so a small volume of users in a particular region could require the deployment of a new PoP if those users represented a high-value Egnyte customer. This in turn inflated Egnyte’s capital outlay and operational cost per user. Egnyte’s network ops team was saddled with an ever-increasing maintenance overhead as the high number of PoPs required to serve global enterprise customers were deployed. Not only was it a big investment in time to bring up a new PoP, but customer deployment was cumbersome too. Each new Egnyte customer that used a distributed PoP required several hours of setup time when their service was initiated. Finally, a lack of visibility into the “last mile” to troubleshoot customer issues was still a pain point.
“One of our largest customers has offices in over 145 countries. With Teridion, I can now confidently tell the customer that I can deliver optimal performance at all of their locations.”
Kris Lahiri, VP Operations, CSO, Co-Founder
Egnyte had a few options to consider to address their performance issues.
Tactic #1: Use a CDN
- Upload performance: Upload and download speeds are equally critical for Egnyte. While content caching offered potential improvements in file download times, CDN dynamic site acceleration techniques only offered margin improvements to uploads.
- File security concerns: CDNs intermingle files from multiple customers in regional caches around the globe, raising the risk that a hacker who gained admin privileges on a single cache node could access all files cached there.
- SSL certificate sharing: CDNs require access to Egnyte’s SSL certificates, creating potential security risks for Egnyte and breaking the “chain of custody” for documents stored in the Egnyte SaaS platform.
Tactic #2: Build out a network of PoPs
Egnyte elected to build out a series of regional network acceleration points of presence. Although this custom solution mitigated local performance issues wherever it was deployed, it came with high operating costs and the burden of increased operation and business complexity. Each network PoP was expensive. They each had hardware, software, and network costs, and required a significant amount of internal planning and implementation resources, and there was the thorny issue of cost efficiency.
Egnyte’s global customers naturally expected a consistent level of service for all their users, and so a small volume of users in a particular region could require the deployment of a new PoP if those users represented a high-value Egnyte customer. This in turn inflated Egnyte’s capital outlay and operational cost per user. Egnyte’s network ops team was saddled with an ever-increasing maintenance overhead as the high number of PoPs required to serve global enterprise customers were deployed. Not only was it a big investment in time to bring up a new PoP, but customer deployment was cumbersome too. Each new Egnyte customer that used a distributed PoP required several hours of setup time when their service was initiated. Finally, a lack of visibility into the “last mile” to troubleshoot customer issues was still a pain point.
“One of the biggest advantages we’ve seen in adopting Teridion is the reduction of performance-related support tickets.”
Don David, Sr Director Technical Services
The Global Network Connectivity Challenge
- Combined with their internal monitoring, Teridion’s diagnostic capabilities allowed the identification of middle and last-mile issues, such as informing a customer that a performance issue was localized to a specific ISP.
- Teridion’s scale was far beyond what they could have reached with network PoPs, exponentially increasing the locations they could optimize.
- New customers could be on-boarded quickly and easily, as Teridion did not impose any client or business process changes, which also helped customer acquisition.
- As a turnkey service, Teridion required virtually zero ongoing management or maintenance.
- The high availability of Teridion’s DNS ensured that a DDoS attack against the primary DNS provider was mitigated with no action required on the part of Egnyte or their customer.
Results of Teridion’s Network Performance Optimization
- Operational Costs: Setup times were reduced from several person-hours per customer to five minutes per customer, and network PoP maintenance and operational costs disappeared.
- Customer Satisfaction: Fewer support tickets and average resolution time for customer issues dropped by 50%.