Akamai Edge Platform Increases Security Protections for Content, Sites, and Apps

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences, today announced enhancements focused on maximizing security, quality, and reliability from the cloud to the digital touchpoint. With these new features, the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform enables organizations to optimize and secure the critical point where they monetize and differentiate their services and push the boundaries of digital experiences.

"The edge is both where a business and its customers meet and a place where valuable insights can be gained and shared globally at lightning speed,” said Rick McConnell, President and GM of Akamai’s Web Division. “As enterprises respond to the ongoing expansion of mobile usage and heightened customer expectations, enhancements to the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform are designed to accelerate their digital transformations and improve customer experiences while maximizing security and digital trust."

Moving to the cloud creates security, performance, quality and cost issues for organizations. Akamai’s services can help organizations focus on productivity, profitability and core business operations rather than building out and maintaining their own infrastructure. New capabilities of the platform further address security, media delivery, and web performance challenges by utilizing distributed workloads and intelligence closest to the digital touchpoint where the user interacts with data and applications.

Enhancing Security without Compromising Customer Experience
In order to realize the full return on their cloud investments, organizations must mitigate the threats that come with an expanded attack surface, including bot, DDoS and web application attacks, threats targeting customer digital identities, and content piracy. To address these challenges, Akamai platform enhancements include:

• Increased insight into bot activity: A new bot intelligence console for Akamai’s Bot Manager aggregates data from across Akamai’s customer base to provide greater context, letting users benchmark their bot traffic against other customers as well as the platform as a whole. With insight provided by more than 11B bot requests daily, organizations can see intelligence on specific botnets, including how individual attacks fit into broader attack campaigns against entire industries.
• Extended access security with device posture: Enhancements to Enterprise Application Access (EAA) enable continuous verification of authorized enterprise resource access, key to a zero trust security framework, based on various signals sent and collected by the global Akamai platform and the billions of devices and users connected to it.
• Enhanced agility with WAF rule evaluation mode: IT and security teams can tune and keep WAF protections up to date with less time and overhead. As Akamai continuously updates WAF rules in Kona Site Defender to protect against the latest threats, customers can easily see how new and updated rules will impact their organizations before publishing the rule.
• Real-time content protection to stop piracy: A set of platform enhancements address content piracy, which continues to grow as a major security challenge for media and entertainment streaming companies. Scalable forensic watermarking support, pre-integrated with leading third-party providers, leverages the edge to provide a more effective way to trace piracy back to the source. In addition, a new edge-based Access Revocation API is designed to allow content providers to shut down pirated streams in near real-time.

"Akamai customers recognize the increasingly important role that the edge can play in improving the experience of employees and consumers as they use web and cloud-based applications,” said Ari Weil, Vice President of Product Marketing at Akamai. “Security stands out among the many computing needs bolstered by edge functionality. Edge-based security responds to threats in real-time, enables secure, perimeter-less environments, and captures insight close to the end user."