Akamai’s gatekeeper approach to security

Here’s a security conundrum most businesses face today – the scale to protect against the big attacks means that sometimes they can’t see the small attacks because they get lost in the noise.  And the protection against the small attacks uses a lot of resources that make organisations more susceptible to large attacks.

Akamai’s Security CTO in APJ, Michael Smith however feels that Akamai’s approach of using a little slice of processing across all of Akamai’s servers, can defend organisations against both the big attacks and the small attacks, at the same time.

He explained, “While many other vendors focus on specific elements within the CDN ecosystem like video, we think and act as the gatekeeper.

Michael Smith

“We can, and do deliver a platform that is more diversified and handles content caching, dynamic site accelerating, video delivery and much more, in a holistic manner.”

The basic premise for a content delivery network (CDN), is a server deployment strategy that designs for servers to be located as close to the end user as possible.

“I believe that you can’t separate the CDN from security components, and this ‘gatekeeper’ approach (that Akamai adopts) is critical.”

Cyber resilience

According to Smith, cyber resilience is about implementing a level of preparedness and an ability to respond and adapt to events that threaten their customers’ ability to do business regardless of what that threat looks like.

“In Asia, this is key as businesses here have the advantage of having seen what has been happening in other markets and can learn from them.

“The fact that they are able to respond to the changing marketplace far quicker than say a business in Europe or the United States is also an advantage as many Asian-based businesses don’t have quite as many legacy solutions and systems in place that need to be migrated.”

For Akamai, customers in Asia fit into two different categories: security, CDN or a combination of both.

“The CDN story resonates well with financial services companies looking to expand into ASEAN’s less-developed countries. If you’re doing a market trial in a new country, you don’t want to deploy infrastructure there until you’ve figured out what you’re doing,” said Smith.

He also shared about countries with higher fraud rates that like to use Akamai’s security products for additional assurance. These examples and more are also why earlier this year, Akamai started forming a product management team inside APJ to deal with issues that are specific to this region.

“To that end, there are some exciting projects that we’re working on such as expanding our Security Operations Centre (SOC) to Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore, India. The Bangalore site is expected to become a major SOC for the company outside of the United States and will be at full capacity by year end.

“We’ve also expanded from a single DDoS scrubbing centre in the region in Hong Kong and now have five others globally, including centres in Japan and Australia.  This gives better performance and mitigation capacity inside the region which allows us to better protect our customers and for them to better service their markets.”

Smith concluded that in addition to these moves, Akamai continues to invest in new avenues for additional protection of its customers.