As digital services become mission-critical to enterprise growth, the question facing CIOs is no longer whether delivery performance matters — but whether today’s delivery architectures are still fit for purpose.

Global digital traffic continues to grow at 20%+ annually, driven by video-heavy consumption, cloud-native applications, real-time services, and AI-enabled platforms.

At the same time, user tolerance is shrinking: when a page takes more than 4 seconds to load, roughly one in four users abandon the experience. Performance is no longer a backend detail — it directly shapes engagement, conversion, and brand trust. For CIOs, delivery performance has moved beyond a technical metric; it increasingly influences revenue, resilience, and competitive differentiation.

Yet delivery is becoming harder to manage. Applications are dynamic by design. Infrastructure is increasingly multi-cloud and multi-region. Network conditions shift constantly. In this environment, outcomes depend less on “where content sits” and more on “how traffic decisions are made”— in real time.

This is the backdrop to a clear industry shift: from content delivery networks (CDNs) to intelligent delivery networks (IDNs).

Traditional CDNs were built to cache and distribute content efficiently. IDNs build on that foundation, extending the delivery layer with real-time intelligence, adaptive routing, automation, and integrated security — so optimization happens proactively, not after degradation or disruption.

For CIOs, the priorities are straightforward:

– Treat delivery as a measurable business risk surface — quantify downtime exposure, define risk ownership, and track it alongside other operational and financial risks.

– Manage latency and availability as customer-experience levers — set clear thresholds tied to engagement and conversion, and enforce accountability across teams and vendors.

– Build real-time visibility and control at the traffic layer — ensure you can detect degradation early and dynamically steer traffic across multi-cloud, multi-region environments.

– Integrate security into delivery decisions — make protection part of the delivery path (not an add-on) so performance, resilience, and security scale together.