Akamai Strengthens DDoS Protection with Launch of Canadian Scrubbing Centers

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud company that powers and protects life online, today announced the launch of its latest Akamai Prolexic scrubbing centers in Toronto and Montreal. The new centers offer world-class distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection to regional and global organizations, government institutions, and critical public infrastructure. 

This announcement is part of Akamai’s strategy to strengthen its Prolexic DDoS protection platform with a network of cloud scrubbing centers across 32 global metropolitan areas, offering a staggering 20+ Tbps of dedicated defense capacity. To put this in perspective: Even the largest DDoS attacks make up less than 10% of the defense capacity offered by the Prolexic platform. The local scrubbing centers in Toronto and Montreal deliver several additional benefits to customers in the region, including:

• Minimizing latency and maximizing network performance
• Optimizing operational costs related to network traffic redirection
• Enhancing visibility into and control over the region-specific patterns of DDoS attacks 
  

Canada has experienced a significant increase in the scale and sophistication of cyberthreats in the past three years. According to a recent survey, more than two-thirds of Canadian business executives believe that cybercrime will be their most significant threat in the coming year. In September 2023, the websites of several Canadian provincial governments were brought down by DDoS attacks. Additionally, DDoS attacks on the Canada Border Services Agency disrupted the operations of check-in kiosks and electronic gates across multiple airports. The recent spate of DDoS attacks resulted in an alert for IT professionals and managers from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. 

DDoS has become a relatively inexpensive, but highly effective, cyberattack tool for motivated cybercriminals, state-sponsored hackers, and other malicious actors, who often use such attacks as a smoke screen to then launch triple extortion attacks. To offer the most comprehensive DDoS protection, Akamai recently announced the launch of Akamai Prolexic On-Prem and Akamai Prolexic Hybrid options, which empower customers in the region to leverage the combined benefits of the ultra-low latency and automated surgical DDoS mitigation of on-prem appliances while still getting the scale of the Prolexic cloud to stop volumetric DDoS attacks.

“Over the past two years, DDoS attacks have become bigger, highly sophisticated, and multi-vector in nature. The Akamai Prolexic platform offers comprehensive on-prem, cloud, or hybrid DDoS protection to protect our customers’ digital infrastructure and internet-facing assets,” said Sean Lyons, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Security at Akamai. “The new scrubbing centers in Toronto and Montreal bring DDoS protection even closer to our Canadian customers, allowing Akamai to deliver world-class security without impacting latency and end-user experience.”