The Akamai Intelligent Edge provides security for billions

Akamai powers and protects life online by helping billions of people live, work, and play safe in the knowledge their data is safe.” The most innovative companies worldwide choose Akamai to secure and deliver their digital experience.

The US-based company has the world’s largest and most trusted edge platform, which keeps apps, code, and experiences closer to users and the danger of threats far away.

“Our goal is to make life better for billions of people, billions of times a day,” said Steve Winterfeld, Akamai Advisory CISO, whose role is to engage with customers to understand and solve their security challenges. 

Founded in 1998, Akamai started as a content delivery network and moved into security. “We now do more than US$1b in security work to protect and deliver world-class digital experiences for financial services in a sustainable way,” said Winterfeld. “We support more than 400 financial institutions, including eight of the 10 largest banks in the world.”

Akamai brings both depth and breadth to the cyber fight:

• 4,200 locations
• 1,400 networks
• 135 countries
• 800+ Tbps capacity
• 24/7 monitoring
• 1,900 services experts

Winterfeld noted the threat risk tends to follow the money. “We have a deep threat intelligence capability, and we’re able to use that to enhance our tools to stop, or mitigate, that threat. Ultimately whether it’s that north-south coming into a network and logging into your account or that east-west stopping that ransomware from spreading throughout your network, Akamai is there to protect and enhance that capability.” 

“Transformation today is built around DevOps and application programming interfaces (APIs), which we protect directly,” Winterfeld said. “While Akamai is moving more toward APIs, so are the threats.” He shared some statistics on popular attack vectors and common vulnerabilities from the Akamai 2021 State of the Internet report:

• 3 times more web attacks in 2021 over 2020’s record year
• 86% of the attacks use the common API vulnerabilities SQLi and LFI
• 86% of APIs could allow attackers to forge log data or inject malicious content into data
• 68% had incorrectly released resources before they were made available for reuse
• 47% contained hard-coded passwords

“We’ve had web pages for a long time with security controls. Digital transformation is new, and a lot of that security isn’t as mature, so we need to rapidly include security. As the threats continue to evolve, Akamai can help you get situational awareness of where your risks are today.”

Finastra relies on Akamai

Finastra — the world’s largest pure play financial services software company, with more than 8,600 customers —which they help protect their customers through their web application and API protection capability, uses Akamai web application and API protection capabilities. 

“If someone carries out a direct attack or denial-of-service attack against Finastra, Akamai security solutions step in to mitigate so these types of threats don’t impact its customers.” 

Finastra’s Chief Information Officer, Russ Soper said: “We leverage Akamai’s Global Business Intelligent Network with visibility to over 30% of global internet traffic, complementing Finastra’s own operations.”    

As companies move toward the cloud, Akamai will be working with customers on their security controls. “We focus on automation as more of our customers leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to minimise the human aspect.” 

To learn more, visit www.akamai.com, where you can check out the Akamai learning hub, security blogs, threat research, and the most recent Akamai State of the Internet report.