Fastly’s Edge Cloud Industry Reports: A Year in Review

This past year, we created a series of industry reports to help businesses plan their edge cloud strategies for performance, security, and more – and while these are industry-specific – many of the challenges will sound familiar no matter what you do. Learn how a smart strategy at the edge opens up innovative solutions to common problems.

Join us as we look back on the highlights, lessons learned, and what they mean for the future.

Edge Cloud Strategies for Airlines

Optimizing a complicated infrastructure is hard when you don’t own or control big pieces of your data supply chain or rely on a 3rd party vendor who constitutes a lot of your backend. Both are true for the airline industry and in a situation like that, you have to look at what you can control and start making gains there. Strategically moving more to the edge is a smart place to start, but it’s also important not to recreate the complexities on the edge. Point solutions that exist on different edge networks and get cobbled together don’t bring the same benefit as a more unified approach. 

Optimization Challenges for Gaming

Gaming platforms, which are responsible for game distribution, need to ruthlessly optimize to serve as much as possible from their CDN’s cache. This means they can scale down the number of servers and scaling capacity they have to manage on their own. Solving that reduction in complexity helps with everything from reduced capital expenditures on hardware, and a smaller technology footprint to manage and secure, and even better developer productivity. It also means a significant reduction in egress charges for data transfers; these reductions can be sizable and have a meaningful impact on overall finances. 

Balancing Performance and Security for eCommerce

When we set out to look at eCommerce, we were curious if there was a consistent trend where the web-native direct-to-consumer organizations were outperforming more established competitors that entered the online shopping arena as an extension of their stores and outlets rather than the other way around. At this time, there’s no indication this is actually the case. Instead, when looking at the data, we can conclude that few are doing good but that most have their work cut out for them if they want to remain relevant to potential shoppers.

Security Advantages for Finserv

The Financial Services (Finserv) industry is focused on security, and while performance is still a factor, it has historically been relegated to a secondary or maybe even tertiary concern. By contrast, in our industry report for Digital Publishing, you can see that the top publishers all shared a motivation to optimize their site and application performance with page load times that eclipsed what you find across many other industries. Publisher revenue is often driven by web traffic, and faster load times mean better search rankings, better user experience, and more engagement. Other industries are under less pressure, with their revenue and profitability less directly tied to every millisecond of improved site performance. 

Streaming Media is Under Seige!

Although adoption is still in the early stages, forensic watermarking in streaming media is increasingly used to safeguard high-value content, especially during early-release windows when the risk of piracy is high. It can be integrated into both live and on-demand streams and deployed alongside real-time monitoring systems to detect leaks quickly. This approach provides a strong deterrent against piracy by holding those responsible for breaches accountable​. 

Healthcare's Rapid Digital Transformation

The current state of IT infrastructure in healthcare is at a critical junction, balancing between rapid digitalization and persistent vulnerabilities. As hospitals and healthcare providers increasingly rely on interconnected systems for health records, telemedicine, and connected medical devices, the demand for robust, resilient IT infrastructure has surged. However, much of the industry is hampered by legacy systems not designed with cybersecurity as a priority. Many healthcare organizations continue to run outdated operating systems and software, which lack crucial security updates. This situation is compounded by the reliance on third-party vendors and interconnected devices, which broaden the attack surface and increase the chances of unauthorized access.

Scaling, Performance, and Cost for SaaS

The Software as a Service (SaaS) industry has big challenges, but finding efficiencies in these areas can present huge wins. Moving more to the network edge can help with scaling infrastructure efficiently, ensuring robust security, and maintaining compliance amidst evolving regulations. The competitive landscape and changing customer expectations drive constant innovation and business model disruption, so selecting an edge cloud platform must account for flexibility in the future to avoid costly lock-ins like SaaS has experienced as they move away from their overreliance on cloud architectures.

How can an edge cloud strategy help you?

Adopting edge cloud strategies is no longer a luxury for businesses; it has become a necessity in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. As organizations seek to enhance their operational efficiency, improve customer experiences, and harness the growing volume of data, edge computing offers a compelling solution to reduce latency, increase speed, and optimize resource utilization.

Didn’t see your industry in this recap? Check out the full collection of reports.