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CDNs Plunge into Red-hot Object Storage

Providers of content-delivery networks (CDNs) are increasingly adding cloud-native object storage to their roster of services.

Object storage services is a hot trend because the technology is crucial to harvesting unstructured data for use in business analytics as well as in AI modeling and inferencing. And since this kind of unformatted data, including email, photos, video, audio files, and entries on social media comprise an estimated 80% of enterprise data, object storage is becoming essential for data management.

Object storage breaks data into units called objects, each of which contains metadata and a unique identifier. The metadata allows for easy management and the unique identifiers aid information retrieval, typically via REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs, which support HTTP requests over the Internet.

Providing object storage in cloud-native format online is a logical next step for CDN companies with extensive international networks. Companies such as Akamai, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Fastly, Gcore, Storj, and Leaseweb are finding fresh opportunities to address corporate data management requirements. And cloud hyperscalers such as Alibaba are also finding it makes sense to add object storage services to their CDNs.

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