Akamai Named a Major Player in IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Public Cloud IaaS 2025 Assessment

Akamai has been named a Major Player in the recently released IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service 2025 Vendor Assessment. Akamai was previously named as a Contender in the 2022 report for this market.

The IDC MarketScape says: “Akamai’s deep-rooted expertise in CDN and security gives the company a unique edge in handling the complexities of global, high-performance content delivery.”

We believe this recognition is significant for the following three reasons:

1. A strengthened Akamai cloud platform — In our opinion, it validates the investments and improvements we’ve made over the past two years to strengthen and scale our cloud platform to meet the requirements of increasingly demanding customer challenges.

The report noted, “The company’s commitment to datacenter expansion, security innovation, and low-latency application access underscores its credibility as a trusted partner for cloud transformation.”

2. A vision for the future — How we were recognized in  the IDC MarketScape reflects growing recognition of why we acquired Linode and our vision of a more distributed cloud — a deliberate step toward building a cloud for the next decade, not the last.

The report noted, “Since its acquisition of Linode in 2022, Akamai has accelerated its journey into the public cloud IaaS space, transforming from a pure-play CDN provider into a formidable public cloud competitor. Akamai has leveraged Linode’s developer-focused offerings and coupled them with Akamai’s global scale, security expertise, and an expansive edge delivery network.”

3. A focus on delivering better experiences — Most important, though, it puts a firm stake in the ground that Akamai’s is a cloud built to help enterprise customers and developers deliver a better experience. One could argue that this focus on delivering a better experience is baked into our corporate DNA, whether through our founding roots in delivery, our ability to protect life online, or our ability to push the cloud further to the edge.

The report noted, “Akamai's competitive advantage lies in its robust CDN and security services seamlessly integrated into its cloud offerings.”

All of this plays into the larger shift happening across the ecosystem. The clouds built on a centralized architecture are starting to show their limitations as applications demand lower latency and better performance, and customers look for ways to get compute and data closer to their users — a requirement traditional cloud models were never designed for.

As organizations grapple with these limitations, the need for a more distributed cloud provider has never been clearer.

The report noted, “There is also an increased emphasis on a distributed approach to cloud infrastructure that spans hyperscale datacenters, private facilities, telco networks, and edge locations. When combined with the previous trends of hybrid and multicloud architectures, cloud has become the ubiquitous platform for innovation regardless of where it is deployed.”

And when we look at the bigger picture revealed in the IDC MarketScape, we see there's another fascinating trend at play. What was once a market dominated by three major players is evolving into a more diverse and competitive space (Figure). This diversity and competition is further evidence that the cloud ecosystem is becoming more distributed.