Consistent Security Everywhere: Akamai Makes Leading WAF Technology CDN-Agnostic
The modern security mandate: Consistent protections in every environment
Applications no longer live in a single location. Organizations are running workloads across multicloud environments, private data centers, Kubernetes clusters, and on-premises infrastructure, all while maintaining a growing edge footprint. This complexity presents a critical security challenge:
How do you enforce consistent security policies across every environment without creating operational silos, policy drift, or security gaps?
At Akamai, we envision a future in which security isn’t dictated by infrastructure constraints. Instead, organizations should be able to deploy a unified policy that protects applications and APIs — everywhere, every time.
We recently announced that we are extending our trusted web application firewall (WAF) protections beyond the edge into hybrid and multicloud environments with Akamai App & API Protector Hybrid.
Extending Akamai’s proven and trusted protections to anywhere
Akamai’s market-leading web application and API protection (WAAP) solutions have been optimized for edge delivery — they inspect traffic as it enters a content delivery network (CDN) or security perimeter. But challenges arise when critical applications operate outside of the protection boundary.
Internal traffic needs protection: Many security solutions focus only on north-south traffic (internet-facing), leaving east-west traffic (service-to-service communication inside networks) unprotected.
Multicloud complexity demands flexibility: Security policies often break down when applications span multiple cloud providers with differing architectures.
Resiliency requires availability: Whether it’s stakeholders or contracts that require redundancy, the extended protections remain available even if the CDN connection is disrupted.
App & API Protector Hybrid addresses these challenges by extending proven security rulesets from Akamai’s Adaptive Security Engine into environments that operate off the edge. This means that applications hosted in private data centers, public clouds, and hybrid environments can enforce the same level of security traditionally provided at the edge — protecting against Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 threats, known exploits, and zero-day vulnerabilities.
Why this matters for security teams today
Security leaders are tasked with protecting increasingly dispersed applications while balancing efficiency, visibility, and cost-effectiveness.
App & API Protector Hybrid enables organizations to:
Standardize WAF protections across hybrid environments — ensuring a single source of truth for policy enforcement
Reduce operational overhead by consolidating security policy management across edge and non-edge environments
Enhance resiliency by bringing security closer to applications and reducing reliance on a single enforcement point
Accelerate cloud transformation without sacrificing security — allowing DevOps teams to deploy securely across multicloud and on-prem environments
Security without silos: A consistent policy for every environment
One of the biggest pain points for security architects is managing disparate security policies across multiple infrastructures. Without centralization, organizations risk:
Policy drift: Security rules must be updated manually across different platforms, which can lead to inconsistent enforcement.
Operational complexity: Teams juggle multiple security tools with different logging, rulesets, and policy engines, which can create blind spots.
Increased attack surface: Applications operating outside the edge perimeter often lack the same level of WAF and API security protections, which leaves a gap that threat actors can exploit.
App & API Protector Hybrid simplifies security policy management by integrating with Akamai Control Center, allowing teams to define policy then enforce it everywhere. Whether applications are deployed on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, private cloud, or on-prem, App & API Protector Hybrid offers uniform security enforcement without unnecessary complexity.
The strength of local resiliency
Security must be resilient to disruptions. App & API Protector Hybrid introduces localized protection that ensures applications remain secure even in an unlikely scenario in which edge connectivity is temporarily unavailable. This means that even during outages or service disruptions, your applications and APIs continue to:
Block attacks that leverage known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and zero-day exploits
Enforce OWASP Top 10 protections consistently
Prevent unauthorized access attempts and policy violations
Our vision of unified security and where we are today
App & API Protector Hybrid represents a major step toward the vision of unified security. Today’s launch of App & API Protector Hybrid includes:
Adaptive Security Engine–derived WAF rules for consistent security enforcement
Protection against OWASP Top 10, zero-day threats, and CVE exploits
Centralized policy enforcement through Akamai Control Center
Kubernetes-native deployment with autoscaling
We invite security leaders to explore the power of Akamai’s WAAP solutions today and be part of the journey toward a world in which application security is as agile as your business.
Are you ready?
Are you ready to extend your WAAP security foundation? Contact us to learn how. And continue to follow Akamai for news on the expanding capabilities of App & API Protector Hybrid and help bring more of Akamai’s powerful security intelligence closer to your applications.