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Egnyte awarded best-in-class for content collaboration by optimizing global network performance with Teridion

A Teridion Case Study

Egnyte faced global performance challenges, with users in Asia and South America experiencing slowdowns due to Internet Backbone issues. Traditional solutions like CDNs and building PoPs were deemed unfit. Teridion’s Internet overlay network emerged as a game-changer, offering a 15x performance boost globally. This turnkey solution outperformed Egnyte’s PoP network, reducing setup times, maintenance costs, and customer issue resolution times by 50%, providing a competitive edge in content collaboration.

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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

Egnyte faced global performance challenges, with users in Asia and South America experiencing slowdowns due to Internet Backbone issues. Traditional solutions like CDNs and building PoPs were deemed unfit. Teridion’s Internet overlay network emerged as a game-changer, offering a 15x performance boost globally. This turnkey solution outperformed Egnyte’s PoP network, reducing setup times, maintenance costs, and customer issue resolution times by 50%, providing a competitive edge in content collaboration.

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.

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.”

In addition to performance issues associated with the Internet Backbone, Egnyte lacked visibility into the middle-miles and last-mile of data transit to customers. This prevented them from effectively identifying and helping customers troubleshoot problems. The first indication of performance issues often came from customer support calls.
Egnyte had a few options to consider to address their performance issues. 

Tactic #1: Use a CDN

Egnyte discarded this option out of hand. CDN-based solutions were fundamentally a bad match to Egnyte’s requirements:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.”

The Global Network Connectivity Challenge

Egnyte needed an alternative to their PoP strategy that did not compromise security, offered acceleration for both file upload and download, worked globally, and was cost-effective. During their search, they discovered Teridion. Teridion’s Internet overlay network makes SaaS applications faster and more reliable by radically improving public cloud Internet performance up to 15x, anywhere in the world. Teridion’s Internet overlay network is optimized for dynamic content, including bidirectional data-in-motion, content collaboration, and large file transfers. In addition, Teridion’s overlay network is ideal for organizations that must deliver a global service, including China and other Asian countries, as well as Brazil and other South American countries. Teridion delivers these results by continually analyzing the performance of the global Internet backbone and predictively routing traffic around Teridion’s solution congestion, outages, and high-loss paths. Thousands of global monitoring agents across all leading public cloud providers feed real-time performance data to an orchestrator, which then uses the insights to construct and optimize Virtual Backbone Networks. A VBN is a dynamically generated, per-customer Internet overlay network that routes traffic using three key metrics: throughput, latency/end-to-end delay, and packet loss. Beyond the improvement in performance that Teridion offered, Egnyte identified several additional advantages: Moving to full production, Egnyte realized these advantages:
  •  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

Egnyte’s position was that any solution had to meet or exceed the performance they could get from their internal custom network PoPs, and Teridion met the challenge. In an extensive beta, Teridion was compared quantitatively end-to-end with the existing network PoP environment and qualitatively through continual engagement with Egnyte’s global customers. The results more than satisfied their performance requirements. Moving to full production, Egnyte realized these advantages: Performance: Matched or exceeded the performance of Egnyte customers using Egnyte’s own Network PoP network, giving Egnyte a competitive advantage in file upload and download speeds while maintaining control and end-to-end encryption.
  • 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%.
The most compelling proof point is that Teridion’s Internet overlay network gives Egnyte a competitive advantage in the content collaboration market. IDC completed a benchmark in 2016 that identified Egnyte as having best-in-class performance, despite the fact that several of the competitors in that benchmark have more than ten times higher investment in regional data center infrastructure. Ultimately, Teridion enables SaaS companies like Egnyte to better leverage the global cloud footprint to deliver a superior customer experience across the globe; and all through a turnkey service.
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