Learn how a billion-dollar publishing company migrated from Akamai to Cloudflare CDN, achieving huge cost savings, faster performance, and accelerated time-to-market.
Key Takeaways
Direction
Speed
Velocity
The Challenge
Scholastic, a global multi-billion-dollar publishing and education giant, faced growing challenges with their decade-long reliance on Akamai as their Content Delivery Network (CDN). With nearly 20 different business units and websites catering to schools and general audiences across the U.S. and worldwide, the company required a cost-efficient, scalable, and secure CDN solution. However, the existing Akamai infrastructure proved increasingly rigid and expensive, costing $1.2 million annually in licensing fees while limiting the agility of digital operations.
The company also handled 2TB of annual bandwidth exchange, with heavy bot protection needs for login sites that relied on a stacked CDN model, making bot mitigation both costly and complex. Additionally, highly centralized management and Akamai-driven change control slowed down the ability to iterate and improve configurations, requiring support intervention for every update.
Scholastic also faced an ever-growing set of 13k+ configuration lines and 20k+ redirects, making CDN management increasingly challenging. To address these issues, Scholastic sought a modern, flexible, and cost-effective CDN solution that would enable decentralized control, enhanced security, and operational efficiency without disrupting ongoing business operations.
Our Solution
Icreon partnered with Scholastic to drive a CDN re-platforming initiative that enhanced security, improved performance, and reduced costs. After evaluating Akamai, CloudFront, and Cloudflare, Cloudflare emerged as the ideal solution, offering 70% cost savings, enterprise-grade bot mitigation, and 30% faster edge performance over Akamai.
Direction
Icreon conducted a detailed platform evaluation, prioritizing decentralized management, security, cost efficiency, and DevSecOps integration. While CloudFront offered lower costs, it lacked robust security features, making Cloudflare the preferred choice due to its strong bot protection, containerized architecture, and enterprise-grade security. The team also negotiated optimized pricing and 24/7 structured support to maximize value for Scholastic.
Speed
To ensure a seamless transition, Icreon executed a phased migration plan, starting with a three-month Proof of Concept (PoC) to validate Cloudflare’s performance. Icreon’s migration team then migrated 70+ subdomains in a staggered rollout, leveraging automated deployment with Terraform to enable 95% automation in configuration management. By collaborating with six cross-functional teams, Icreon ensured minimal disruptions while optimizing redirects, cache rules, and security configurations.
Velocity
The migration delivered 33% faster performance, validated through extensive testing, while cutting CDN costs by 70%. Scholastic also saw a 45% reduction in time-to-launch for new websites, thanks to decentralized control and streamlined deployment processes. With enhanced security, improved scalability, and significant cost savings, Scholastic now operates on a modern CDN infrastructure, enabling faster, more secure digital experiences worldwide.