Akamai Intelligent Platform
The most pervasive, highly-distributed cloud optimization platform with over 150,000 servers in over 92 countries within over 1,200 networks
Delivers between 15-30% of all Web traffic
90% of the world’s Internet users are within a single “network hop” of an Akamai server
So how can Akamai help?
Scale – offload expensive Web infrastructure while scaling globally & under peak traffic conditions - without additional infrastructure investment
Performance - deliver fast, quality web experiences to all end-users - no matter what location, browser, device or network - to grow the business
Intelligence – understand end-users’ web experiences and tailor optimizations based on their situations
In more detail -
Get content closer to end-users
Maximize origin scalability and availability
Maximize origin offload
Accelerate requests back to origin
Aggressively prefetch DNS, objects and pages to Edge & browser
Aggressively reduce requests for fewer round trips
Aggressively minimize payload for fewer bytes delivered
Expedite rendering for better perceived performance
Improve visibility into end-user web experiences
Empower the edge & origin
What Akamai provides is multiple perimeters of defense in the cloud for Web security. What that means is that you get a range of security solutions – in the cloud – that can provide a layered defense to protect against the latest DDoS and Web attacks.
The first perimeter is built on the same network as our Web experience solutions. With over 157,000 servers deployed across 1200 networks in 92 countries, it can secure your websites from DDoS and Web attacks while improving performance. You guys are probably already familiar with how our Web experience solutions work – every user connects to the closest Akamai Edge server. We serve cached content directly from cache, and for dynamic content, we route the user to the origin through the most optimal path.
When someone launches a DDoS attack against your website, they’re really launching a DDoS attack against the entire Akamai platform. Just like users, every bot automatically connects to the closest Edge server. For network-layer DDoS attacks like UDP floods or NTP reflection attacks, we just drop those attacks at the edge - instantly. For application-layer DDoS attacks, we do two things. First, with our 157,000 servers, we have an enormous amount of resources – whether it’s the number of connections or compute power to process millions of HTTP requests – to absorb the largest attacks, and after that, we have adaptive rate controls that automatically kick in to throttle or block traffic from malicious IP addresses from hitting our platform.
Because it’s on the same network as our acceleration solutions:
You get protection from DDoS attacks without the typical performance impact
You get the ability to protect against encrypted attacks against your secure websites
You can protect your websites wherever they are, whether they’re deployed in your own data centers or in a third-party cloud.
The first perimeter also includes our highly scalable web application firewall that provides always-on defense against data theft. It’s always inspecting web traffic as it comes onto our platform, as we’re accelerating it to the origin, for requests that attempt to exploit known web vulnerabilities. And with 157,000 servers deployed around the world, we have an enormous amount of distributed resources to inspect web traffic as it comes onto our platform without slowing down the flow of traffic to the application. This is a huge advantage over other solutions, especially on-premises WAF appliances that only inspect traffic once it’s entered your data center. In addition, Akamai leverages the visibility that we have into 15 to 30 percent of global web traffic every day to constantly refine our WAF rules and minimize false positives and false negatives, so that the WAF a) stays up to date on the latest threats and b) doesn’t impact legitimate user access.
And again, because it’s on the same network as our acceleration solutions:
You get the ability to protect against encrypted attacks against your secure websites
You can protect your websites wherever they are, whether they’re deployed in your own data centers or in a third-party cloud.
CLICK – PERIMETER 3
The next perimeter focuses on protecting your origin infrastructure from DDoS attacks, using a BGP-based technology to route all inbound network traffic to entire protected subnets through an Akamai scrubbing center, where we can inspect it for attack traffic and block that traffic from reaching the origin. Prolexic Routed is available as either an always-on or on-demand service and is backed by our 24x7 SOC and industry-leading time-to-mitigate SLAs.
CLICK – PERIMETER 4
And the final perimeter is DNS, where we provide a highly scalable cloud-based DNS service to both increase performance and improve DNS availability even through the largest DNS-based DDoS attacks. Our Fast DNS solution is highly scalable, with normal DNS traffic representing less than 1 percent of our total capacity, comes with a 24x7 SLA, can dramatically improve DNS resolution times for any website behind Akamai through zone apex mapping, and can support primary or secondary deployments as well as DNSSEC requirements.
Emil’s point that Media Analytics does not apply to games..
The Akamai Intelligent Platform is a leading cloud platform for delivering secure, high-performing user experiences to any device. It manages the underlying complexities of the Internet and conducting business in the cloud. The platform is made up of a distributed network of servers and intelligent software, delivering over two trillion interactions daily. No one delivers more web traffic than Akamai, and 90% of Internet users are only a single network hop away. The Akamai Intelligent Platform is constantly monitoring web conditions to:
Identify, absorb, and block security threats.
Provide instant device-level detection and optimization.
Make decisions based on comprehensive knowledge of network conditions.
Present unprecedented business and technical insights.
Delivering 15-30% of all daily web traffic
> 2 trillion interactions daily
Defending against attacks over 200Gbps
Enabling >$250 billion in annual e-commerce
A single network hop from 90% of internet users