Published on: September 10, 2024
In this SafetyDetectives interview, we sit down with Edward Tsinovoi, co-founder and CEO of IO River, to explore the growing need for Multi-CDN solutions in today’s digital landscape. With over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and a background leading key initiatives at Akamai, Edward shares his insights on the challenges companies face in optimizing performance, security, and availability across multiple edge platforms.
We delve into how IO River’s innovative Virtual Edge solution is transforming the market, offering businesses of all sizes access to enterprise-level multi-CDN technology. Edward also discusses the evolving nature of cybersecurity threats and how IO River ensures both optimal performance and robust security for online services.
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to co-found IO River?
My name is Edward Tsinovoi. I’m the co-founder and CEO of IO River, bringing over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, primarily in the deep tech space. Before launching IO River, I was with Akamai, where I led an organization responsible for their core platform. We focused on end-user performance and developed edge computing technologies for our clients. Akamai is the largest CDN provider and a pioneer in the CDN world, having built the first CDN at the end of the 90s.
We decided to create a Multi-CDN as a service solution because we noticed a trend where companies in different verticals, including large players like Amazon, eBay, and Inditex (the tech company behind Zara), were adopting Multi-CDN solutions and building them in-house. However, this process was extremely complicated and challenging for them. It was clear that it wasn’t feasible for medium and large-sized companies to build such solutions themselves. We wanted to make this capability accessible to everyone, including midsize and large companies, which is why we launched IO River.
How does IO River’s Virtual Edge solution differentiate itself from other Multi-CDN setups?
We didn’t invent the Multi-CDN approach; it’s been around for more than 10-15 years. These legacy Multi-CDN solutions allowed traffic to be split between multiple CDNs and edge vendors, optimizing performance through intelligent traffic distribution. However, they left customers needing to integrate with multiple different platforms, which vary significantly in terms of network distribution, APIs, and technologies. Large companies have built entire engineering organizations with tens of people to manage such complex architectures. This level of investment is impossible for most companies, even large enterprises.
What we do at IO River is build a comprehensive Multi-CDN as a service solution that offers several benefits. It intelligently splits traffic to optimize reliability, performance, and cost. It also provides a unified layer that allows you to manage, configure, and monitor all your vendors through a single user interface and API. This enables flexibility to cherry-pick the best for every CDN and create “a CDN mix” that suits to any business. Additionally, we offer a collection of application services in the areas of security, traffic control, and edge computing that work consistently and optimally, even when traffic is split among multiple edge vendors.
This comprehensive solution is new to the market; there’s nothing like it available today. The alternative for customers is to try building it themselves, but that’s not feasible for most large and medium-sized enterprises.
Can you explain the significance of achieving 99.999% availability and how IO River ensures this for its clients?
From what we hear from our largest customers, achieving high availability is a significant challenge. For example, one of the largest PaaS vendors in the world told us they aim for a platform availability of 99.99% (four nines). However, even when working with premium CDN vendors, they found that a single CDN could not provide four nines of availability. It doesn’t matter if it’s a large, established CDN or a newer, innovative one; none of them can achieve even four nines on their own.
The only way to achieve such high availability is to work with multiple CDNs. When you work with several CDNs, it becomes much easier to achieve four nines and even five nines. If there’s a problem with one CDN, you can quickly shift traffic to another. The chances of two CDNs experiencing downtime simultaneously are minimal, which allows you to maintain high availability. Our system enables this automatic traffic shift in case of a problem, ensuring that your service remains available even when an issue arises.
Additionally, in the CDN world, there are both global and local downtimes. Local downtimes happen daily in different locations and can cause significant damage to customers, potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. For large e-commerce companies, every minute of downtime represents significant financial loss.
What are the main security challenges that online services face today, and how does IO River address them?
Today, with the growth of traffic, partly due to the rise of generative AI, it has become extremely easy to generate new content. This has led to a tsunami of digital content that needs to be delivered worldwide. As a result, more companies are looking to adopt multi-edge platforms. On the other hand, security capabilities are increasingly moving to the edge. In the past, WAF (Web Application Firewall) services and DDoS protections were primarily on the origin side. Today, these capabilities are moving to the edge.
You can now have WAF services on platforms like Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly. However, when you want to split your traffic across multiple vendors for optimal availability, performance, and cost-efficiency, you face a challenge. Your security configurations may differ significantly between Vendor A and Vendor B. To maintain consistent security across multiple edge platforms, you need a solution like IO River that provides consistent and optimal security service even when traffic split among multiple edge platforms..
Today, there is no other solution like IO River for this. Even large enterprises that build in-house solutions often introduce an additional tier where they place security services between the edge and the data center. This creates additional points of failure, introduces latency, and is much less cost-efficient compared to the IO River solution.
How do you think the increasing complexity of cyber threats is shaping the future of online service delivery and security?
For online services, security is critical as cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated. With all the protections built over the years, attackers have also become more advanced. Given the growing amount of traffic, you need a scalable security solution that is smarter than what was used in the past. It should be able to leverage multiple different solutions intelligently, allowing you to utilize the best WAF, bot management, and edge platforms in the industry for optimal protection.
Therefore, we will see more security solutions moving to the edge because that’s where the load can be managed effectively. You can’t handle all your security at the origin; there’s too much traffic. You need to distribute it and move security closer to the end users. As a result, the edge becomes a more critical and complex component. You’ll need to protect all these compute resources at the edge, and relying on a single edge platform would make you inefficient and vulnerable. Effective security requires redundancy and distribution, ensuring both availability and robust protection.