Akamai Introduces Edge Platform Enhancements

New Capabilities Designed to Improve Cloud Security, Accelerate Time to Value, and Streamline Operations for Cloud Applications

Akamai, the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences, announced enhancements designed to help businesses accelerate their cloud migration strategy. The new features protect content, apps, and APIs, accelerate web and mobile experiences, and help make development teams more agile as they move to the cloud.

“Eighty-five percent of companies today have a hybrid cloud strategy, but many have begun to realize that the cloud brings significant challenges to security, operations, and cost management,” said Rick McConnell, President and General Manager of Akamai’s Web Division. “Cloud migration introduces complexity that can slow app deployments, cause cost overruns, and expose businesses to previously unknown security risks. With enhancements to our platform, Akamai surrounds and extends client infrastructures, leveraging the edge and advanced security to alleviate cloud challenges.”

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Enhance Security

Akamai has expanded its portfolio of adaptive security capabilities that are architected to enhance protections while enabling businesses to deliver excellent user experiences. New offerings can intelligently serve or block access to content with a fully integrated Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Domain Name System (DNS) proxy detection service. Intelligence added to Akamai’s Token Authentication capabilities extends coverage for browsers and devices that do not support cookies and also makes it more difficult to play back stolen content. Finally, standard TLS addresses the need to deliver HTTPS at massive scale while providing a customer-branded SSL certificate, all of which are critical for large broadcasters and streaming TV distributors.

To fight the growing threat of increasingly sophisticated bots, Akamai has continued to develop technologies designed to improve visibility into malicious botnet activities on customer sites as well as those targeting other businesses. In addition to enhanced detections in the company’s bot management solution, Akamai has also improved self-serviceability, enabling customers to finetune their own settings for advanced bot detection and deploy agile defenses against fast-evolving automated threats.

Organizations undergoing digital transformation are heavily leveraging APIs to power new customer experiences and create new revenue streams. Protecting APIs requires purpose-built solutions for governance, management, and security. Akamai now supports automated protections of API traffic, new attack groups across its web application firewalls, and advanced throttling capabilities in its API Gateway solution.

Akamai’s managed DDoS solution now includes improved traffic profiling and attack reporting along with the ability for security teams to better configure app-layer DDoS protection. Customers benefit from the value of an edge platform, with edge servers positioned to automatically block network-layer DDoS attacks and respond to application-layer DDoS attacks within seconds.

Akamai has also integrated its security and performance services with the Akamai Identity Cloud following the acquisition of Janrain, the industry-leading customer identity access management solution. This significantly improves the protection and performance of consumer login pages and is poised to deliver incremental value to customers in combating additional fraud use cases in 2019.

Akamai will showcase its full range of security solutions at RSA Conference USA 2019 in San Francisco, March 4-8, where Akamai will exhibit in booth 6153, Moscone Center North Hall.

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Accelerate Time to Value

Akamai has also launched new capabilities designed to help organizations innovate faster and gain greater agility. Automating adaptive acceleration capabilities including HTTP/2 performance optimizations and loading font libraries can improve user experiences. To further improve security, Akamai is now making TLS 1.3 delivery standard.

The company has also expanded its image management solution to include support for short-form video that helps improve customer experiences through rich, engaging content.  A series of new features support DevOps teams, including middle-mile logs to more precisely investigate performance issues and the ability for developers to test their logic in a local development environment before deploying those changes to production.

Streamline Operations

The Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform is also introducing an expansive set of improvements that support the operation of sites, apps, and APIs, from concept to production deployment.  A completely re-engineered Akamai Control Center simplifies operations with detailed reporting across security, acceleration and delivery from a single pane of glass.  Through close collaboration with its customers, Akamai has improved navigation, optimized alerting, made it more intuitive to take action, and added real-time support capabilities including a live chat function.

Teams looking to automate deployment and operations can leverage the robust DevOps and APIs to accelerate time to market, including real-time production management capabilities, scriptable APIs and toolkit integrations. Customers leveraging the Akamai edge can not only carefully monitor application usage and performance but also maximize offload to optimize their cloud service investments. These features can create efficiencies for internal teams by allowing them to scale, accelerate their pace of development, and achieve more predictable cloud pricing, while reducing downtime.

A new set of purpose-built services offerings, from architecture, design and project scoping through fully managed security and performance optimization, act as an extension to digital application teams. The Akamai Health Check Service provides customers with insights into their traffic and the effectiveness of their deployed digital experiences from Akamai delivery, security, and performance optimization experts.

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