I am sure there are plenty of reasons to use CDNs while developing public internet application, but when you are developing intranet applications, it is better to stay off CDNs and use local resources. Specially for young developers, who have grown up with them, it is difficult to see why. Here are my four reasons as to why you should not use CDN in intranet applications:

  1. In high speed gigabit ethernet environment, there is a high chance a CDN resource will take longer to load than local resource or entire page for that matter.
  2. Even though the company uses high-speed ethernet, CDN can become slow or unresponsive due to internet provider issues. In that case, the application will most certainly break.
  3. While it is tempting to use latest and greatest resources CDN offers, it can happen that new version of CDN resource breaks your application.
  4. In extreme cases it can happen that CDN resource gets compromised and turned into super evil script. The affect that has on you and your users should be self-evident.