Strategic platform updates designed to support secure cloud adoption, superior web and application performance and availability, high-quality and scalable video streaming and streamlined application development
Akamai Technologies announced significant enhancements that are designed to improve website, app, and network security without compromising the performance of digital applications. With these additions, Akamai’s cloud delivery platform is architected to serve as a crucial foundation for digital business, with security and agile deployment capabilities supporting digital transformation, next-generation network architectures, and increasingly popular DevOps workflows.
Today’s modern enterprise organization is operating within a digital landscape full of risk and uncertainty. To maintain productivity, security and competitive differentiation, organizations 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 organizations’ apps and infrastructure through volumetric DDoS attacks, Akamai is deploying additional capacity to its scrubbing centers 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.
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.
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, optimize, 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 optimization features of the Ion acceleration solution, digital asset optimization capabilities and support for the Brotli compression algorithm, Image Manager optimization, and network optimization capabilities in an enhanced mobile application performance SDK.
