NZN creates more than 100 Edge Applications and reduces their websites’ loading time by 50% using the Azion Platform

Challenge

As the owner of several successful brands, NZN is responsible for a large part of the digital content that circulates on the Brazilian Internet. On average, their websites receive 200 million pageviews and 23 million unique users every month.

The challenge is even greater when we take into account that six out of ten people have increased their media consumption in 2020^[1]; and 69% of users say that an extraordinary experience raises their expectations of other companies^[2].

Therefore, providing agility in loading videos and news is an important competitive advantage for NZN, allowing them to:

• retain the audience on its pages;
• increase engagement and retain more consumers;
• improve search engine positioning; and
• generate higher amounts of clicks and views for advertisers.

Not only performance, but availability must be maintained amidst large spikes in access and adverse scenarios such as DDoS attacks, which grew by 50% in the first six months of 2020^[3]. These are obstacles that conventional technologies are not prepared to overcome.

After researching the largest global technology suppliers aimed at innovating and improving service, NZN opted for Azion’s Edge Platform, which has more than 30 points of presence in Brazil and the resources needed for NZN, the largest vertical creator in the country, to continue to evolve.

Solution

Studies show that Edge Computing has the capacity to improve resilience and user experience by 200%^[4], and Azion has provided NZN with the necessary instruments to obtain gains of this proportion.

To expedite content delivery at the edge of the network, NZN implemented Azion Edge Cache. With this product, users’ devices do not have to fetch content from NZN’s origin server. Instead, content is accessed closer to users from a cache in Azion’s Edge network.

When content is not in the Edge Cache layer, which is common in NZN’s dynamic context, Azion Edge requests the content from an intermediate layer, Tiered Cache. Through this, NZN is able to maintain delivery agility and save on computational resources in its infrastructure origin.

In addition to being able to scale, NZN reinforced the security of its applications with Azion WAF and DDoS Protection, which support large traffic spikes even during today’s most complex attacks and prevent threats from reaching NZN’s origin infrastructure.

Results and Impact

In the first week of their partnership with Azion, NZN was able to construct a schedule to deploy more than 100 Edge Applications in just one month. Since then, NZN has continued to grow, with approximately 200 applications now hosted on Azion’s platform.

Azion’s Serverless Edge Computing model simplified the management of NZN’s resources, allowing NZN to save on infrastructure costs by answering more than 90% of requests directly on the edge.

More than reducing infrastructure costs, moving workloads to the edge improved the customer experience in several aspects, including a 50% reduction in content loading time for all sites integrated with the NZN platform.

In terms of availability and security, the first major impact was the mitigation of DDoS attacks during NZN’s first Black Friday event, resulting in an interruption-free service. Now, each site is protected by its own WAF instance that defends against SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting and many other attacks.

In addition, the migration to Azion’s Edge Platform occurred without complications and without compromising their pages’ position in search engines, where the group’s websites lead in ranking for many diverse subjects related to technology, news, entertainment and many other matters.

“The benefit went far beyond performance. Flexibility and ease in using Azion’s products to build and monitor applications is one of the company’s main differentials. Another highlight is the service and concern that Azion has for its customers”

Cezar Baldi, Chief Technology Officer at NZN.

About NZN

In Brazil, one in five users consumes content from NZN, the largest vertical creator in the country and owner of some of the most important online brands in Brazil, such as TecMundo, The BRIEF, MegaCurioso, Minha Série, Baixaki and Click Jogos. Founded 20 years ago in Curitiba, NZN gained prominence even in its first years of activity, when it launched Baixaki, which today has 5.4 million unique users. Since then, NZN has launched many other sites that together have a monthly audience of more than 23 million. With so many consumers looking for quality content, NZN has a highly trained team to ensure excellent performance on its websites and bring unique experiences to more and more people.