The increasing reliance on live and on-demand video streaming for enterprise communication and learning has become a key driver in making corporate video one of the fastest-growing data in the cloud.
Cloud computing offers unlimited scalability to store increasing volumes of corporate video as well as the agility and flexibility to accommodate any fluctuating demands for live and on-demand video streaming content. Launching a corporate video strategy in the cloud also helps enterprises avoid the cost and hassle of installing and maintaining video streaming hardware on-premises.
In addition, the increasingly robust security and compliance standards provided by contemporary cloud giants have helped establish cloud video streaming as a reliable alternative to traditional on-premises solutions. Cloud innovation is also an important factor that allows users to avail the value-added corporate video streaming features and functionalities that would not be available to them in-house.
Despite all these benefits though, cloud video streaming is often perceived with suspicion due to bandwidth, latency and network connection dependency concerns stemming from the remoteness of geographically dispersed data centers in the cloud. Bandwidth issues are further intensified in the case of live video streaming which requires a high-quality internet connection with minimal latency and a steady stream of bandwidth.
While such concerns are valid, VIDIZMO ensures that all network and bandwidth-related issues are thoroughly addressed as part of our corporate video streaming solution.
Here is how we do it.
With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, internet service providers are competing for finite network and computing resources used to power the Internet. High internet availability and responsiveness are crucial to business operations when a large number of users are trying to access the same internet service simultaneously.
Content must traverse through multiple backbones and long distances of unreliable networks over the internet, resulting in spotty delivery because of network congestion or backbone peering problems. For businesses, this presents a fundamental challenge since their internet usage is limited by bandwidth availability at the origination point.
In the case of corporate video streaming, where a continuous flow of bits through a network is key to moving a large amount of data to a destination, this results in inferior video streaming speed and degraded corporate video quality due to packet losses, congestion, and narrow pipes.
Solution: Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) emerged as a solution to internet service degradation as they move content to the “edge” of the internet i.e. close to end-users, resulting in reduced origin server loads, distributed network traffic, and reduced latency.
To distribute live or on-demand corporate video streaming over the internet across the world, VIDIZMO uses Microsoft Azure, a Verizon & Akamai CDN with point of presence (PoP) around the globe, which serves to enhance global content delivery with high scalability and reliability. NBC, for instance, uses Microsoft Azure CDN to livestream Olympics to millions of viewers around the world since 2014 due to its reliability and quality of service.
While a public CDN such as Azure addresses the challenges associated with video streaming and delivery over internet across the world, enterprise networks may still face network and bandwidth challenges while receiving a streaming video from the cloud. Such problems arise mainly because of small incoming internet bandwidth pipes installed on-premises or in the case of live broadcast sessions that involve a large number of people viewing a video stream concurrently in the same location.
VIDIZMO Solution: VIDIZMO provides multiple solutions to enterprises faced with video streaming bandwidth challenges. VIDIZMO solutions include converting unicast streams from the cloud into multicast streams using Windows Media Server behind the firewall or installing VIDIZMO’s eCDN (Edge Caching Appliances) in each bandwidth-congested location to replicate one incoming stream into thousands of streams within a Local Area Network (LAN).
As a result, viewers receive corporate video content from either a multicast stream or from a VIDIZMO eCDN Edge Caching Server in proximity to their location – all while incurring reduced bandwidth costs and efficient load distribution.
With geographically dispersed data centers, cloud servers sometimes experience spotty internet connection, resulting in problems with network latency, i.e., the time delays between a host server request for a page resource and the processing and delivery of the request (a roundtrip between a data request and its delivery). Latency can also spike in case there is a sudden increase in use of the cloud, a higher load of video streaming, or because of mobile users accessing data over a 3G network.
VIDIZMO Solution: VIDIZMO integrates CDN technology to help solve any issues with video streaming latency by caching static resources in edge cache servers distributed across regions, thereby bringing requested resources closer to users and reducing the round trip time. In addition, cloud computing services increasingly run on a worldwide network of secure data centers regularly upgraded with the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate data center, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.
Cloud computing requires a reliable and high-quality internet connection for users to be productive, both onsite and in remote scenarios. Reliability of user-end internet connectivity, therefore, plays a major role in determining the accessibility of video streaming data stored in the cloud, which could be a drawback in case of connection loss or spotty internet.
VIDIZMO Solution: With content caching devices installed near the user-base, VIDIZMO resolves network issues using CDNs in the case of spiking internet traffic for heavier loads of video streaming. Moreover, as wireless and broadband internet becomes readily available at cheap rates, any connection issues can be resolved, even in low-bandwidth conditions.
Cloud services include Express Route services such as Microsoft Azure Express Route. These allow organizations to add compute and storage capacity to their existing datacenter, with a fast and reliable connection to Azure. ExpressRoute connections are private because they do not go over the public internet, giving the enterprise a fast and reliable connection to Azure with higher throughput connection and lower latencies – making Azure feel like a natural extension to the enterprise datacenter.
VIDIZMO Solution: When VIDIZMO is installed in Microsoft Azure Cloud, customers have the choice to add Azure ExpressRoute between Microsoft Azure data centers and the customer’s on-premises infrastructure. Such a scenario allows customers to have a dedicated 50MB to 10GB video streaming bandwidth that connects Azure Cloud to a company’s local LAN at high speed, addressing any bandwidth concerns stemming from the geographical dispersion of cloud data centers and customer premises. Additionally, this solution can also result in significant cost benefits in scenarios such as data migration, disaster recovery and business continuity, as well as other high-availability strategies.
For more information about VIDIZMO's corporate video streaming solution and its deployment options in the cloud, on-premises or hybrid model, contact our team for more information or sign up for a free 30-day trial today.