Quickly solve enterprise globalization network challenges and accelerate and protect enterprise cloud applications

[51CTO.com original article] On the afternoon of November 11, when online shopping reached its peak, many IT practitioners chose to spend money by recharging their learning. 51CTO and Akamai Information Technology Co., Ltd. jointly held an offline salon in Chengdu with the theme of "Quickly Solve Enterprise Globalization Network Challenges, Accelerate and Protect Enterprise Cloud Applications". Dozens of IT executives with overseas deployment needs attended the salon. On the scene, Chen Yulong, CIO of the listed group company Hiseco, and Li Yuelin, technical consultant of Akamai, respectively gave participants wonderful speeches on how enterprises can cope with various overseas challenges from the perspectives of enterprise users and CDN manufacturers. In the interactive session, the guests and participants had a lively discussion, and the atmosphere was very warm.

The reason why we chose Chengdu to hold this salon is that under the guidance of the "Belt and Road" policy, Chengdu is located at an important intersection of the "Belt and Road" and the Yangtze River Economic Belt. In the future, it will not only be the center of foreign exchanges in the west, but also a national central city, and an important window for foreign cooperation. It is not difficult to foresee that many Chengdu companies will choose to expand their business overseas in the future. However, due to the complex global network operating environment, how to provide users with a faster, more stable and more secure application experience? CDN technology is the first choice for many companies. The original intention of 51CTO and Akamai to hold this salon is to let more and more corporate users understand how to use CDN technology to further enhance their business value overseas through in-depth communication.

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These four types of problems need to be prepared for overseas layout

Chen Yulong said that Hiseco is a listed company with multiple business formats that engages in new drug research and development, generic drug development, and medical device and pharmaceutical sales. With the development of Hiseco's business, the group began to expand globally: establishing a research and development center in the United States, having a research and development center and cooperative institutions in Israel, having a clinical trial base in Australia, and having some cooperative institutions in Europe. When expanding overseas, the IT department discovered a very serious problem: in the past, the company's IT system was very stable and smooth, but when visiting foreign research and development centers or branches, it often showed that it could not be connected, the official website could not be opened, and the business system (ER, PR, OA) could not be accessed, or even if it was connected, the speed was very slow.

In order to solve this problem, Chen Yulong divided Hiseco's data into four categories and adopted different solutions based on the characteristics of each category.

The first category is the company's public documents and official website data, such as documents and data on the official website or publicly available to partners and dealers. Chen Yulong first optimized this type of data to reduce the space it occupies, and then found a public cloud service provider in Europe and the United States to host his own server on the public cloud. As for internal data, he purchased an enterprise network disk that supports global business and stored the data in it. When he needs to share it in the future, he only needs to send a link to the other party.

The second type is the company's office system and business system, such as CM, ERP, OA, and DSP, which have high requirements for security. The formulas, process or certain scientific research results of the pharmaceutical industry are core secrets and require physical and virtual dual isolation. There are many security measures in China, and the security is relatively high, but the data of foreign R&D centers cannot be isolated and needs to be transmitted back to China. Hiseco built its own VPN, set up firewalls, routers and APPs at the group headquarters, and connected the local routers to the VPN of the group headquarters in places with branches and subsidiaries such as the United States and Israel. The data is encrypted first and then transmitted back through the VPN channel to ensure the security of the data.

The third type is large-capacity data. At that time, Hiseco acquired a company in the United States and needed to migrate all the company's 15-year data to Hiseco's data center. If more than 10T of capacity were downloaded using a public cloud platform, it would take about two years, which was obviously unacceptable. In the end, Chen Yulong took an encrypted hard drive and took a plane to copy the data back. Of course, this is by no means a long-term solution. Chen Yulong is considering using the same cloud platform overseas and domestically, directly transferring data to the cloud platform, and realizing the circulation of large-capacity data through an internal acceleration mechanism.

The fourth category is emails. Chen Yulong did not pay much attention to the email problem at first, because tens of thousands of emails were sent between China and foreign countries in a month, and the business volume was not large. However, he found that many emails sent to foreign users or cooperative organizations were always bounced, or emails sent to the company by others could not be received at all. Later, he found the reason. It turned out that the problem occurred in the self-built email system. Because Hiseco's emails are self-built, when sent to certain companies or institutions with higher security, because they are not world-renowned email service providers or operation service providers, the other party's system will directly default Hiseco's emails to junk files. Later, Hiseco transferred the email system to the public cloud. Since its domain name is trustworthy among internationally renowned email service providers, the phenomenon of bounced emails has been greatly reduced. However, if it needs to be migrated to other public cloud brands in the future, or from a security perspective, there will still be obstacles.

Let me introduce you to Akamai

Akamai technical consultant Li Yuelin first introduced Akamai's position and influence in the CDN market. He gave an example that Victoria's Secret has a premiere fashion show every year, which is a catwalk show broadcast live on the global Internet. The global Internet live broadcast behind the scenes is handled by Akamai, and the entire viewing process was very smooth. A few months later, Apple's Steve Jobs found Akamai and hoped that Akamai would help them broadcast the global release of Apple products. Since then, all Apple product launches have been broadcast live by Akamai. Because it was Double Eleven that day, Li Yuelin also took the shopping platform of that day as an example. After using Akamai's solution, the web page loading time was reduced by 36%, the order increased by 10%, and the conversion rate increased by 27%.

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Li Yuelin said that Akamai is the inventor of CDN technology. From the development of edge caching to the present, CDN has undergone several generations of changes and its functions have become more and more abundant. While ensuring user experience, it is also necessary to protect against network attacks. With the popularization of wireless networks, it is also necessary to improve user access experience from the mobile end. He revealed that although there are many CDN manufacturers, most CDN manufacturers are still in the most basic stage of CDN static caching. Some leading CDN manufacturers can achieve dynamic acceleration, and even more can identify terminals and optimize mobile networks. However, only Akamai can transfer business logic to edge nodes to achieve the best user access experience. It is understood that Akamai carries about 30% of the world's Internet traffic, and it also fully considers security protection. For example, Akamai has multi-layer defense mechanisms to protect against security threats such as DDos attacks, WAF application attacks, attacks on original station servers, and DNS protection.

Li Yuelin also pointed out that the first two types of data problems mentioned by Chen Yulong above can actually be easily solved through Akamai's CDN solution. There is no need to purchase enterprise network disk or build a VPN by yourself. You can still achieve faster and more secure network transmission effects, and CDN is more cost-effective.

Helping enterprises to go global better

Enterprise cloud computing and mobile office are two particularly obvious trends at present. Under such a general situation, many business and applications of enterprises need to be migrated to the Internet for access. Since Internet access involves different terminal types, different network environments, etc., it is particularly important to help enterprises provide users with overall security and efficient access.

Li Yuelin took Siemens as an example. Siemens' business architecture is unified in a data center at the European headquarters, and the access to other businesses is carried out through the Akamai CDN platform. Through a single data center to achieve overall user access to the global office system, data can be very well scalable, consistent, and secure, and corporate customers can focus on protecting data security in the data center. With the rapid growth of Siemens, the number of visits doubled in the second year. Although the overall IT budget did not increase exponentially, Siemens' IT department smoothly supported the growth of data through CDN and big data centers, without additional IT budget costs. This is also a point that CDN is more attractive to enterprises.

Finally, Li Yuelin also said that the "Belt and Road" is a very good policy, which encourages Chinese companies to go overseas. Akamai has node coverage in almost all the countries along the "Belt and Road". "This means that we have better resources to cover these areas. When local users come to visit, we transmit resources closer to users through nodes to achieve fast user access." Li Yuelin concluded.

If your company encounters the same problems as mentioned in this article overseas, or if your company is planning to go global and is struggling to solve the challenges of global network, please visit Akamai's official website, where we will provide you with the most suitable solutions: www.akamai.com/cn

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]