By Steve Miller-Jones, Vice President of Product Strategy at Limelight Networks
Content Delivery Network – we are going to see a continued focus on improving the experience of live streaming, with focus on quality, latency, advertising & engagement and content security. AR and AI will start to play a role, certainly in the engagement and advertising side.
We are seeing clear guidance that industries expect the broad adoption of standards by vendors and suppliers in the SaaS, IaaS and PaaS space (CDN, Clouds etc). Examples are File based IMF, IPv6, SMPTE 2110 etc. There are very clear signs that adopting and being part of standards and best practice implementation is important for our customers.
Application and Data Security – I think we are going to see some consolidation of services and more “all in one” bundles offered to customers. DDoS attacks and application/data breach will continue to be the big news items when they concern data and system “takeover”, and if they impact significant internet services, infrastructure or public services.
Content protection and piracy will continue to be interesting for protecting content rights, as the rights and distribution market continues to mature and adopt OTT as a core part of the content distribution play. Forensic watermarking and DRM will continue to be the mainstay of protection capabilities, and we will probably see the value of automation in this area. In addition to this, and perhaps more importantly, I think that we will see the continuation of the battle against “fake” content in legitimate channels and this will extend into OTT content distribution. This issue is almost the inverse of content piracy, but just as important. Can we be sure that what we are delivering for any customer, is in fact the legitimate content that they expect to deliver. What can be done within our part of the supply chain to ensure that legitimate and authentic content is being distributed. Watermarking and modes of authentication are key to solving for this issue and will become a new security concern in the near future. In an age of information warfare, we must consider that we are the front line of defense.
Edge services – What I think we will see over the coming year is the emergence of an “edge” closer to the interconnection point with the ISPs that will essentially be a distribute application platform (DAPL) – common service platforms that enable companies to deploy their Service Orientated Architecture (or Microservice) application in multiple locations, rather than in a centralised “cloud”. The benefit of this is lower latency applications, reduced operational cost and higher efficiency. This is visible if we look at what EdgeGravity are doing, what Packet & Linode are doing and what companies like Limelight are doing with ArcLight and our forthcoming Function as a Service platforms. These approaches enable companies to architect their platforms as micro-services, distribute instances of them to where they need to be instantiated, and then be scaled on demand when they are needed. 5G will be a key part of this DAPL service layer, as it will be available and common, scalable services being available at the network edge.
We will see further emergence of industrial IOT in the growth areas of agritech, water & waste technology and travel and clean energy technologies. Whilst these are still emerging industries, they are AI, automation and data driven and will all need services that can help them collect, manage and make sense of the vast amounts of data and process interaction that they will create. Edge Services and distributed application platforms will emerge as critical components of these services.