Great news for xRM (www.xrm.com) partner hosted customers—you can leverage a content delivery network (CDN) to help improve the performance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for your end users. This is especially useful for organizations with users based out of international locations, or even users on the East Coast of the United States.
For those unfamiliar with a content delivery network, it’s a service that can decrease the download time and improve performance of a website. It is a large system of servers deployed in numerous data centers across the globe. The geographical locations of these datacenters vary by the CDN provider. The idea is to distribute the static content of your website, such as pictures and videos, to locations closer to the people accessing this website. That way, less data needs to travel great distances.
How do you know if your CRM organization needs a CDN? If your users, especially those located in international locations, are experiencing long load times and poor performance when using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. When users are accessing your xRM hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM organization from a non-US based location, network latency and congestion adversely affect the overall experience for those users. Internet bottlenecks exist between geographic areas where traffic needs to cross an ocean and between Internet Service Providers’ peering connections.
Once a CDN is enabled for your Microsoft Dynamics CRM organization, users no longer need to traverse the entire path back to the xRM data center to load all requested data. The CDN has a large presence (130,000 devices across 80 countries) and is a single hop away from 90% of Internet users. It accelerates the connection from the Edge server utilized in the network back to xRM through route optimization, TCP optimization, compression, and content caching. In turn, the xRM servers respond to the closest Edge server, with the data then flowing back to the requesting client via the CDN.
It boils down to this: Performance improvements when enabling a CDN for Microsoft Dynamics CRM include a 20% increase in speeds for users within the United States and a minimum of a 50% increase for users outside of the US.
If you are interested in leveraging a CDN for your xRM hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM organization, please contact us.
You can learn more tips, tricks, and tutorials for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, please check out our xRM blog and our Success Portal. If you would like to receive training from our team of experts, please inquire about our QuickStart Training.