Akamai Announces Next Generation DDoS Defense Platform

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud company that powers and protects life online, today announced a significant evolution of its DDoS protection platform (Prolexic) with a global rollout of new, fully software-defined scrubbing centers, which will extend its dedicated defense capacity* to 20 Tbps and accelerate future product innovations. In the wake of increasingly sophisticated and record-setting DDoS attacks worldwide, the move further enables Akamai Prolexic to defend customers from the largest, multi-terabit attacks and provide better performance and reliability for online businesses of any size, anywhere on the planet.

New and additional globally distributed scrubbing centers analyze incoming traffic, identify threats and remove malicious activities to prevent downtime for end users or networks. The centers are fully software-defined and facilitate rapid deployments for capacity extension, better regional coverage and improved redundancy.

The initial rollout commences in Q3 2022 and continues in 2023 with additional centers being deployed in all major regions, including North America (US-East/West, Canada), Europe (Italy, Spain, Switzerland), Asia (India, Japan, Hong Kong), and the Middle East.

DDoS threats are evolving rapidly, subjecting businesses without the proper defenses to considerable risk. Since 2020, organizations have experienced a deluge of DDoS extortion, high-profile, multi-terabit attacks, hacktivism, and an explosion of novel threats.

Security teams are also under immense pressure to defend against a booming arsenal of increasingly sophisticated attacks. In 2010, the top five DDoS attack vectors represented 90% of all attacks, whereas today’s top five accounted for a mere 55%.

“DDoS attacks are innovating at an unprecedented rate, but our customers can rest assured that Akamai’s DDoS defense evolves even faster and will always be many steps ahead of the latest threats,” said Akamai’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Security, Sean Lyons. “This platform advancement drastically accelerates our time to market and will enable us to deliver new cybersecurity innovations with greater frequency. In addition, our extension of defense capacity, regional presence and next generation scrubbing centers further strengthens our ability to mitigate all types and volumes of attacks. And by bringing DDoS protection even closer to our customers, they know they can rely on Akamai to deliver unmatched security without impacting latency and end user experience.”

Akamai Prolexic stops attacks with a cloud-based DDoS scrubbing platform to protect applications wherever they are deployed, whether in a data center, the public cloud, or a colocation facility. It provides comprehensive protection against the broadest range of DDoS attack types and defends against high-bandwidth sustained attacks, as well as today’s complex multi-vector attacks that jump from application to application. Prolexic includes proactive mitigation controls tailored to network traffic to stop attacks instantly, backed by active mitigation performed by Akamai’s 24/7 global SOCC, and provides customers a unique 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

*Dedicated defense capacity represents the resources available for consuming and stopping attacks, and is a better indicator of DDoS mitigation capabilities than total network capacity, which also accounts for traffic delivery and utilization.

About Akamai

Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences — helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. With the world’s most distributed compute platform — from cloud to edge — we make it easy for customers to develop and run applications, while we keep experiences closer to users and threats farther away. Learn more about Akamai’s security, compute, and delivery solutions at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on Twitter and LinkedIn.