Three Cloud-First Akamai Initiatives for Your Cloud Journey

According to a 2020 State of the Cloud Report, 61% of organizations plan to focus on cloud migration this year and 93% have a multi-cloud strategy. This means that on average your organization is using 2.2 public clouds, multiplying your complexity and costs.

While the cloud has delivered on a lot of promises, it isn't getting simpler or easier to manage. At Akamai, we recognize that every cloud implementation is different. To support your ever-evolving cloud journey, I'd like to highlight three exciting cloud-first initiatives by Akamai:

• Cloud Interconnect

• Cloud Access Manager

• Cloud Wrapper

These initiatives work directly with your Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to reduce cost, streamline authentication integration, and provide flexibility for multiple origin and content delivery network (CDN) architectures.

Update for Google Cloud Interconnect

The State of the Cloud Report shows 77% of organizations use cost efficiency and savings to measure cloud progress, while 82% mention cloud spend as one of their primary challenges. Akamai's existing relationships with Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have long helped customers with their cloud integrations. 

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers can now connect directly to Akamai through private network interconnect (PNI) via a self-service behavior in Property Manager to accelerate onboarding. PNIs offer private backhaul to CSPs, enabling discounts on egress costs while providing improved reliability and performance gains. Depending on your traffic type and CSP, your organization can benefit from huge cost savings on cloud egress traffic. Best of all, Cloud Interconnect is included with many of our delivery products. 

As part of this announcement, the self-service capability is now available for Ion and Dynamic Site Accelerator (DSA) customers. Akamai's distribution of PNIs is vast, with many direct-peering relationships.

Cloud Access Manager

Managing your cloud storage and authenticated access is critical for maintaining your enterprise's security posture. This becomes even more important when introducing partners and managing multiple CSPs. Akamai's Cloud Access Manager (CAM) is designed as a single location to manage cloud access keys within Akamai. CAM provides secure management and use of cloud authentication directly in your delivery configuration. 

We're currently supporting AWS and GCP, with support for Azure coming soon.

Cloud wrapper

The average organization with a cloud initiative is over budget on their cloud spend by 23%. One of the most efficient ways Akamai can help reduce your cloud expenses is by reducing the requests to your CSP. Akamai Cloud Wrapper offers a private reserved cache in the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform, shielding your CSP from duplicate requests for cacheable content. 

Akamai recognizes that not all workloads offer the same highly-efficient caching of a traditional shared CDN platform, and Cloud Wrapper offers protection against high traffic origin spikes that lead to increased cloud egress costs and unpredictability. Cloud Wrapper for Multi-CDN provides a central hub for your delivery architecture. 

Coming in Q4, you'll be able to point other CDNs to Akamai Cloud Wrapper as their origin, thereby maximizing cache efficiency and reducing cloud egress even further. To learn more about Cloud Wrapper and its new Multi-CDN feature view the product brief.

Supporting security, performance, and reliability

While these three solutions integrate directly with your CSP, Akamai brings your cloud workloads to the edge as a truly CSP-agnostic platform. Our edge security model features an industry-leading web application firewall (WAF), Zero Trust architecture, and Edge DNS service that integrate seamlessly wherever your cloud journey takes you, providing you the peace of mind that your critical assets are protected from threats. 

Our EdgeWorkers, Cloudlets, and solutions like Image & Video Manager provide the flexibility to take compute workloads from the cloud to the edge where your users reside. Akamai's command-line interface (CLI), APIs, and Terraform providers help automate Akamai as code to support your continuous deployment model.

As your cloud initiative evolves from nascent first step to full blown multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures, Akamai is here to provide a unified edge allowing your business to maintain the security, performance, and reliability that your end users expect. We look forward to sharing more about how Akamai fits into your cloud initiatives in the future.

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