DEVOPSdigest

Akamai announced significant enhancements to its platform to drive insight, agility, and quality for businesses delivering digital experiences using the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform to secure and enable cloud-based applications and web-based experiences.

These new capabilities are designed to:

- Improve resiliency for apps with automated protections, streamlined workflows, and support for additional apps and use cases;

- Enable unparalleled visibility and insight to facilitate prioritization, streamline decision making, and ensure better business outcomes;

- Drive significant cost reduction associated with egress from public clouds, and enhance performance, security and quality for streaming TV experiences;

- Provide powerful APIs and automation to empower developers and simplify complex tasks, and empower developers to maintain agile development practices.

"As more companies move their operations and apps to the cloud, they are striving to balance the demands for security and agility, often firefighting point problems instead of directing their digital strategy. They need greater insight, agility and quality from their service provider partners to get there in a cost effective way," said Ari Weil, VP of Product Marketing at Akamai. "Akamai is innovating to help organizations meet continuously evolving challenges, threats, and competitive pressures."

Akamai is launching new features to address the growing risks that an expanding threat surface presents as cloud adoption accelerates and architectures continue to evolve toward a zero trust model. As botnets become larger, more sophisticated and better able to harness the power of AI to target web applications, security pros need tools that can layer detection methods such as statistical analysis of user behavior, sensor inputs from connected devices, and continuous updates to reputational scoring.

With this release, Akamai customers will benefit from edge security platform improvements that support business insight with streamlined workflows and real-time and historical reporting abilities, so that customers can understand the impact that hacker techniques like botnets are having on protected endpoints. Added agility comes from automated protections and built-in API protection to secure the entire web application footprint, and new client connectors that secure employee and application access from anywhere. Akamai has also expanded its platform for instant DDoS attack mitigation to provide additional capacity and regional coverage.

Akamai is also introducing new features designed to help businesses balance the challenge of enabling developers to create cutting-edge experiences that maximize customer experiences, while maintaining rigorous cybersecurity discipline. The Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform already surrounds and extends enterprise and cloud solutions so organizations can benefit from increased resiliency and quality while cost-effectively executing their cloud migration strategies.

Now, customers using Akamai to support their cloud-delivery operations can benefit from real user insights to understand the impact that changes to a web page or application can have on user experience, enabling them to make better decisions. That insight can be leveraged by organizations to implement automated performance and quality improvements, drive delivery efficiency, accelerate rendering, and eliminate errors that negatively affect the user experience. Akamai has also added support for federated development, containerized environments, and microservices architectures, empowering developers to iterate and test site changes and Akamai configurations before deploying them.

Akamai is also introducing solutions that help to make streaming TV easier and more cost effective from multiple origins – including scenarios where content is hosted by cloud providers – while also helping customers provide better viewing experiences. Akamai Direct Connect is designed to help customers achieve reliable, secure and cost effective first-mile transit for linear video. This platform update also provides ultra low latency support for live and linear streaming typically within one-to-two seconds of traditional broadcast, using the common media application format (CMAF).

In addition, Akamai Cloud Wrapper is architected to provide flexibility for customers using public clouds, improve offload performance and reduce transit costs. These platform updates will be particularly useful as broadcasters shift more of their content workflows to the cloud.