Akamai enhances Cloud Delivery Platform

Today’s modern enterprise organisation is operating within a digital landscape full of risk and uncertainty. To maintain productivity, security and competitive differentiation, organisations must take steps to evolve their overarching network architecture.

“Akamai has spent the last twenty years building and improving the largest, most reliable cloud delivery infrastructure on the market,” said Ashutosh Kulkarni, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Web Security and Performance, Akamai. “We understand that our customers are operating in an increasingly competitive, fast-moving digital environment. To help them drive differentiation and value with their customers, the Akamai platform is providing automation, tools and technology to securely move more applications to the cloud, streamline the delivery of seamless web and mobile experiences, and improve developer agility without compromising security or quality across hybrid environments.”  

New Enhancements to Combat Security Risks, Including Those From Bots

As businesses move their digital operations to the cloud, systems are exposed to the risk of DDoS attacks, application-level attacks, and the increasing number of threats posed by bots. Akamai’s 2017 State of the Internet Security Report found that more than 40 percent of online login attempts are malicious, and the Ponemon Institute reports breaches based on this attack vector can, on average, cost a digital business $60 million a year.

New enhancements to the Akamai platform are designed to manage the growing challenge posed by bots and mitigate the threats posed by credential abuse. Akamai Bot Manager has added capabilities to protect apps and APIs, including a client SDK for mobile applications. For larger botnets that threaten to overwhelm organisations’ apps and infrastructure through volumetric DDoS attacks, Akamai is deploying additional capacity to its scrubbing centres to mitigate the ever-growing volume of DDoS attacks that have been threatening digital businesses.” Akamai offers secure browsing and support for HTTPS everywhere with TLS 1.3 and unparalleled visibility into evolving threats and threat actors via enhanced security analytics.

Secure access in a Zero Trust era

As the traditional corporate security perimeter dissolves and enterprise applications move to the cloud, secure unified access and single sign-on have become an imperative. Akamai’s Enterprise Application Access is designed to enable IT and security teams to move towards a Zero Trust security architecture, while simplifying secure access and reducing the attack surface associated with cloud migration, the dissolving corporate perimeter, and an increasingly mobile workforce.

Fast, secure web and mobile experiences

According to data from Akamai’s Retail Performance Report, a two-second delay in web page load time increases bounce rates by 103 percent, and 53 percent of mobile browsers will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load.

As application architectures evolve and digital applications become more complex, it is increasingly challenging for businesses to ensure consistently high customer experiences. Akamai’s newly-deployed features have enhanced its platform’s ability to monitor, optimise, and validate application performance with the addition of perceived performance, page construction, and application delivery metrics to its mPulse real user monitoring solution.

Once issues are identified, features inherent to several solutions are designed to ensure the integrity of application engagement and experience, including: the script management and resource optimisation features of the Ion acceleration solution, digital asset optimisation capabilities and support for the Brotli compression algorithm, Image Manager optimisation, and network optimisation capabilities in an enhanced mobile application performance SDK.

“Customer experience is critical for our business and we are excited to be working with Akamai to understand how web performance is impacting and driving our key business metrics across our many global sites,” said John Paris, Service Manager, Skyscanner. “We can now monitor and optimise the digital experience using actionable insights from mPulse RUM that help us prioritise fixes and enhancements that will deliver the most business impact.”

The intersection of DevOps and Security: DevSecOps

Additional new platform features address the need for infusing security into DevOps, as more enterprises work to find that balance between accelerated development cycles and the mindset that “security is everybody's responsibility”. Akamai has added support for scripting to automate application security using its flagship web application firewall, Kona Site Defender, as well as improved management and versioning support for API protection. In addition, the Akamai API Gateway provides an integrated solution architected to accelerate, secure, and manage APIs, including the ability to expose, authenticate, and manage access to APIs to maximise revenue and prevent misuse and abuse.

Quality at scale for OTT Content and Advertising

Akamai continues to focus on bringing the quality, performance and reliability of traditional broadcast television to the Internet, while protecting pay-TV and OTT service providers, broadcasters and consumers from a growing number of cyber threats. Recent innovations in streaming media delivery, monetisation and security include: Media Services Live, featuring liveOrigin™ functionality, which significantly drives down latency while maintaining exceptional video quality; its Broadcast Operations Control Center real-time monitoring and issue detection service; Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) capabilities to help scale addressable advertising; and security solutions designed to help ensure service and content availability.

“Building trust is at the core of Akamai’s offerings. Not only trust that we are delivering the highest possible performance for web or media content, but also that the content is secure against theft and disruption,” said Rick McConnell, President & General Manager, Web Division at Akamai. “As our customers digitally transform their businesses and meet the demands of their users for rich, high-quality content, Akamai is committed to helping them deliver an exceptional and secure experience.”