Akamai upgrades global cloud infrastructure

Akamai, which claims to own the largest cloud platform in the world, has upgraded its content delivery network.

The company says its infrastructure has undergone “significant enhancements” which will improve user experience without compromising security or performance.

Ashutosh Kulkarni, senior vice president and general manager, web security and performance, Akamai, says: “Akamai has spent the last twenty years building and improving the largest, most reliable cloud delivery infrastructure on the market.

“We understand that our customers are operating in an increasingly competitive, fast-moving digital environment.

“To help them drive differentiation and value with their customers, the Akamai platform is providing automation, tools and technology to securely move more applications to the cloud, streamline the delivery of seamless web and mobile experiences, and improve developer agility without compromising security or quality across hybrid environments.”

Akamai says its enhancements are designed to manage the “growing challenge” presented by bots and mitigate the threats posed by credential abuse.

Akamai Bot Manager has added capabilities to protect apps and APIs, including a client SDK for mobile applications.

For larger botnets that threaten to overwhelm organizations' apps and infrastructure through volumetric DDoS attacks, Akamai is deploying additional capacity to its scrubbing centres to mitigate the ever-growing volume of DDoS attacks that have been threatening digital businesses.

Akamai offers secure browsing and support for HTTPS everywhere with TLS 1.3 and unparalleled visibility into evolving threats and threat actors via enhanced security analytics.

The enhancements will also make websites load faster, claims Akamai, which cites statistics from its own research which show that a two-second delay in web page load time increases bounce rates by 103 per cent, and 53 per cent of mobile browsers will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load.

John Paris, service manager, Skyscanner, says: “Customer experience is critical for our business and we are excited to be working with Akamai to understand how web performance is impacting and driving our key business metrics across our many global sites.

“We can now monitor and optimize the digital experience using actionable insights from mPulse that help us prioritize fixes and enhancements that will deliver the most business impact.”