Akamai to acquire Guardicore to address ransomware

Akamai Technologies agreed to acquire Guardicore, a start-up that offers software-based network segmentation tools, for approximately $600 million. 

Guardicore’s micro-segmentation solution is designed to limit user access to only those applications that are authorized to communicate with each other. By denying communication as the default, the threat surface and risk exposure are drastically reduced, thereby limiting the spread of malware and protecting the flow of enterprise data across the network. This protection extends beyond the data center to the cloud, including bare metal, virtual machines and containers. Guardicore is based in Tel Aviv.

Akamai currently offers a broad suite of innovative and leading Zero Trust security solutions, including Web Application Firewall (WAF), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Domain Name System (DNS) Firewall, and Secure Web Gateway (SWG), that help prevent attackers and malware on employee devices from gaining access to enterprise infrastructure and applications. 

“Given the recent surge in ransomware attacks and increasingly stringent compliance regulations, investing in technologies to reduce the spread of malware has become mission critical,” said Tom Leighton, chief executive officer and co-founder, Akamai Technologies. “By adding Guardicore’s leading micro-segmentation products to Akamai’s comprehensive portfolio of Zero Trust solutions, we believe Akamai will be able to provide the most effective way to combat ransomware on the market today.”

“Guardicore’s mission is to protect enterprises from damage caused by breaches, like ransomware, while safeguarding the critical assets at the heart of the network,” said Pavel Gurvich, co-founder and chief executive officer, Guardicore. “The customer is able to reduce risk in a holistic way across all products, managing from a single console, versus many products and machines. My team and I greatly look forward to joining Akamai to protect the user and the enterprise -  no matter what the user is doing or where end users and workloads are located.”

 

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Akamai hit by DNS disruption

A faulty software configuration update at Akamai triggered a bug in its DNS on Thursday at 15:46 UTC. This led to widespread website outages for many of its customers.

Akamai confirmed via Twitter that the disruption was not caused by a cyber attack.

Once Akamai rolled back the configuration update, the service was restored. The outage lasted for about an hour.

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Akamai hits peak traffic load of 200 Tbps

Akamai-delivered web traffic has hit a new peak at 200 Tbps.  

The traffic spike, which occurred last week, was driven by a combination of major video game downloads, a big sporting event, and several large software updates, according to the company.

Traffic on the Akamai network first hit 1 Tbps in June 2008, then 10 Tbps in September 2012, and 100 Tbps in October 2019. 

https://blogs.akamai.com/2021/03/akamai-focused-on-whats-next-following-new-traffic-milestone.html

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Akamai posts Q4 revenue of $846 million, up 10% yoy

Akamai Technologies reported Q4 2020 revenue of $846 million, a 10% increase over fourth quarter 2019 revenue of $772 million and an 8% increase when adjusted for foreign exchange. Total revenue for 2020 was $3.198 billion compared to $2.894 billion for 2019, up 11% year-over-year and when adjusted for foreign exchange. GAAP EPS for the fourth quarter was $0.68 per diluted share, a 7% decrease from fourth quarter 2019 GAAP EPS of $0.73 and an 11% decrease when adjusted for foreign exchange.

• Web Division revenue for the fourth quarter was $438 million, up 5% year-over-year and up 4% when adjusted for foreign exchange. 
• Media and Carrier Division revenue for the fourth quarter was $408 million, up 15% year-over-year and up 14% when adjusted for foreign exchange.

“Akamai’s strong fourth quarter performance capped off an excellent year in which we surpassed $3 billion in revenue and achieved record earnings per share,” said Dr. Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai. “In addition, our security portfolio exceeded $1 billion in revenue, we delivered record traffic levels on our network and we accomplished our 30% non-GAAP operating margin goal. I am very proud of how the Akamai team supported our global customers and billions of internet users who relied on the internet more than ever before during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we look forward to 2021, we expect to continue investing in innovation and new products with the goal of accelerating our market leadership in security, edge computing and video streaming.”

https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2021-press/akamai-reports-fourth-quarter-2020-financial-results.jsp

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SD-WAN: Branch of One - for the Secure Office Anywhere

In the age of SASE, enterprises are looking for services that will evolve with their networking needs. Employees are transforming the way they operate by re-thinking the concept of work from being at the office to an office anywhere experience. 

In this video, Mick Higgins, SVP of Product at Asavie, now part of Akamai, talks about the growing demand for remote access solutions and how Asavie helps carriers and MSPs deliver a secure office-anywhere service.

https://youtu.be/WPRxvOz1PYA

 

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Akamai acquires Asavie for software-defined global access platform

Akamai Technologies has acquired Asavie, a privately-held company based in Dublin, Ireland, that offers a global platform for managing the security, performance and access policies for mobile and Internet-connected devices. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Asavie automates and manages private networks for businesses at scale, and its solutions are sold by top global mobile network operators. Its platform automates the creation of self-serve, private, network-based services that secure access from mobile and Internet-connected devices to applications and data without requiring installation and management of client software.

Asavie will now become part of Akamai’s Security and Personalization Services product line sold to carrier partners that embed the solution within the technology bundle sold to their subscribers.

“We believe the addition of Asavie will help Akamai’s carrier partners address enterprise and mid-market customer demand for IoT and mobile device security and management services,” said Dr. Tom Leighton, chief executive officer and co-founder, Akamai Technologies. “What’s notable about the Asavie solution is that, as more IoT devices connect over cellular and 5G, it has been shown to be very easy to scale and protect them.”

“We expect COVID-19 to have a lasting impact on how employees work and how businesses operate. Network security needs will be required to evolve in a 5G era where the office needs to go wherever employees happen to work,” said Ralph Shaw, Asavie chief executive officer. “The Asavie suite of software-defined solutions is designed to enable enterprises to provide access to business resources while continuously protecting the business in a world of evolving cyber threats targeting mobile devices, users and applications.”

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Akamai introduces its Edge Cloud

Akamai introduced its Edge Cloud for the delivery of data to connected devices and in-application messaging at scale.

Akamai says its Edge Cloud solution line provides global scale that other data platforms for IoT and messaging lack. Most vendors designed their networks to serve the early adopters where scale, manageability and performance were not necessarily a concern. As more use cases emerge for IoT and in-application messaging, such as Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), the need to offer connectivity for billions of devices, real-time data delivery and capabilities that allow for easier data management are a requirement.

IoT Edge Connect, a new product within the Edge Cloud solution line, tackles these challenges head on by offering a secure framework. Both resource-constrained IoT devices and applications using MQTT for messaging can send or publish information about a given topic to a server that functions as an MQTT message broker.

IoT Edge Connect offers:

Scalability: IoT Edge Connect is architected to scale to support hundreds of millions of endpoints and 10-times more messages than other IoT or in-app messaging cloud solutions. The service reduces device battery drain and optimizes data delivery speed and volume.
Ease of use: Because the service is designed as one continuous global service (logical service) and is fully integrated with an all-in-one data stream, distributed database and a key value store, operations are simplified across the globe.
Security: End-to-end mutual authentication is designed to ensure secure communication between connected endpoints and the Akamai Edge Cloud, while the fully-managed solution also supports data isolation requirements.
Reliability: Businesses can easily and efficiently take advantage of MQTT. In fact, the service is the only International Standard Organization-compliant cloud broker of the major cloud providers with all three levels of Quality of Service (QoS).

With IoT Edge Connect, developers can enable low-latency interactions with millions of endpoints and process data in real-time. Customers using the service can reduce network, compute and database build out, reduce security breaches and improve manageability, avoiding the need to develop and maintain proprietary and costly IoT and in-app messaging networks.

“Akamai believes that we are offering the next generation of messaging with scalability, operational simplicity and security, providing a turn-key solution that allows customers to focus on their core business rather than integrating and managing discreet but necessary components for messaging,” said Lior Netzer, vice president and CTO, IoT, Akamai. “With the launch of IoT Edge Connect, we’re harnessing the power of the Edge and bringing it to the next frontier of connected devices and applications.”

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Akamai to acquire Janrain for identity access management at the edge

Akamai Technologies agreed to acquire Janrain, a privately-held company based in Portland, Oregon. Akamai did not disclose the amount of the all-cash transaction but said the Janrain acquisition would be slightly dilutive to its non-GAAP net income per share for 2019, in the range of $0.05 to $0.06, and to become accretive in 2020.

Janrain specializes in customer identity access management (CIAM), which helps enterprises to enhance digital trust by offloading login and registration workloads.

Akamai said the integration of Janrain's Identity Cloud with the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform is expected to provide enhanced security, regulatory compliance and massive scale to online engagements. The company cited security benefits to CIAM customers in two critical areas: bot management and threat intelligence. Akamai Bot Manager mitigates the risks associated with credential abuse by detecting and managing bot activity at login and registration time and reducing fraud without negatively impacting the user experience. By leveraging Akamai threat intelligence, customers can make smart decisions about which users should be allowed to access registration and login pages based on reputation built on past online behavior.

"It is challenging to conduct business online without an inherent and expected level of digital trust," said Rick McConnell, president of Akamai Technologies and general manager of Akamai’s web division. "Janrain’s Identity Cloud, working together with Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform, will provide an added layer of security to allow our customers to know more about their end users and potentially drive additional revenues from that deepened relationship."

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Akamai continued to grow at 11% annual clip in Q1

Akamai Technologies reported revenue was $669 million, an 11% increase over first quarter 2017 revenue of $600 million and a 9% increase when adjusted for foreign exchange. GAAP net income was $54 million, a 28% decrease from first quarter 2017. Non-GAAP net income* was $136 million, a 19% increase from first quarter 2017.

• Web Division revenue was $353 million, up 16% year-over-year and up 13% when adjusted for foreign exchange.
• Media and Carrier Division revenue was $316 million, up 6% year-over-year and up 4% when adjusted for foreign exchange
• Cloud Security Solutions revenue was $149 million, up 36% year-over-year and up 32% when adjusted for foreign exchange
• Revenue from Internet Platform Customers was $44 million, down 14% year-over-year and when adjusted for foreign exchange.

"We are very pleased with the results of our first quarter performance, which featured continued outstanding growth in our security business, substantial improvement in our media business, margin expansion and accelerated revenue growth overall," said Dr. Tom Leighton, Chief Executive Officer.

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Limelight and Akamai finally settle all legal disputes

Limelight Networks and Akamai Technologies have signed a binding Memorandum of Understanding that settles all outstanding legal disputes between the parties. The parties also agreed to license certain patents to one another as part of the settlement. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Both companies specialize in digital content delivery.

“We are pleased to finally have these disputes behind us,” said Bob Lento, Limelight’s Chief Executive Officer. “We remain focused on our top strategic priorities, including customer satisfaction, employee growth and retention, and delivering superior returns to our shareholders.”

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Akamai Opens OTT Broadcast Operations Control Center

 Further addressing the consumer demand and business requirements for over-the-top (OTT) video quality and experiences that exceed those of traditional broadcast and cable television,

Akamai inaugurated its Broadcast Operations Control Center (BOCC), a state-of-the-art facility located at the company's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass..

The BOCC facility is designed to help ensure the reliability of OTT services through a combination of highly trained technical staff and a host of monitoring, analytics, reporting, quality and availability measurement tools that provide real-time support and operational insight for customers delivering critical live, linear and on-demand video content.

It is staffed 24x7 by a team of specialized broadcast issue resolution experts possessing hybrid skills across media and networking to address the unique needs of Akamai OTT customers. The

The BOCC was designed and is managed by Akamai Director of Media Operations Matt Azzarto, a veteran broadcast systems engineer tasked with bringing together best practices from online video streaming, network operations and television broadcasting into a central hub to monitor and support business-critical OTT video services.

"With the new BOCC, Akamai is helping to address consumer quality-of-experience expectations for OTT by raising our customer service, support and component-level access into the CDN. We're replacing help tickets and hold time with real-time communication and deep, proactive monitoring designed to alert customers to potential issues before they actually arise," explained Azzarto. "We're taking the ubiquity of Akamai's pervasive network and our Media Delivery Solutions, and empowering a specialized staff who have 'eyes-on-glass' 24x7 to support our customers with a unique set of tools that we believe deliver unprecedented visibility into hundreds of live video streams and linear channels at any given time."

http://www.akamai.com

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Internap Teams with Akamai for Cloud Security

Internap and Akamai Technologies announced an alliance to provide customers with Internap’s performance-optimized cloud, data center and network services combined with Akamai’s cloud security and data center protection services.

Internap will offer Akamai Cloud Security solutions to organizations in security-conscious industries – including financial services, healthcare and automotive – that require the infrastructure reliability, availability and scalability that Internap and Akamai jointly deliver. The alliance is expected to result in advanced web security solutions for organizations with performance-reliant applications and workloads, as well as more efficient access to both companies’ technologies.

“Organizations that demand optimal web and application performance simply can’t afford the potentially business-impacting outages and downtime associated with DDoS attacks,” said Michael Ruffolo, Internap’s president and CEO. “We believe this alliance is a logical and powerful combination that uniquely addresses this problem for our joint customers. Akamai will be our sole DDoS mitigation provider, bringing market-leading security capabilities to Internap’s state-of-the-art data center facilities and to our expertise in delivering high-performance cloud, colocation and networking services.”

http://www.internap.com
https://www.akamai.com/

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Akamai Prevails in Long Running Patent Dispute with Limelight Networks

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sitting en banc held that Limelight Networks is liable for direct infringement of a content delivery patent asserted by Akamai Technologies.

In 2008, a jury had returned a verdict that Limelight was infringing the patent and awarded Akamai over $45 million in damages. The ruling reinstates liability for infringement, which had been overturned in a post-trial ruling that has been the subject of appellate proceedings since.

"We are extremely pleased with The Federal Circuit's decision," said Aaron Ahola, Deputy General Counsel at Akamai.  "Akamai is at the forefront of innovation on the Internet and today's ruling recognizes the strength of our intellectual property.  We believe strongly that a company's intellectual property is a vital asset which must be defended to protect shareholder value. "

http://www.akamai.com

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Akamai Enters Strategic Cloud Services Partnership with China Unicom

Akamai Technologies has formed a strategic partnership agreement with China Unicom' cloud division – CU Cloud, one of the largest cloud computing service providers in China.

As part of the strategic partnership, CU Cloud has agreed to complement its own cloud services for global businesses with Akamai's full suite of industry-leading media delivery, web performance, and cloud security offerings.

Specifically, CU Cloud plans to leverage Akamai for CDN technology that will be available for the delivery of its Cloud services. Akamai enables operators to deploy a highly scalable, completely turnkey CDN that leverages the same technologies found within the Akamai Intelligent Platform.

http://www.akamai.com

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Akamai Builds Reputation Profiles of IP Addresses Based on Traffic Analytics

Akamai Technologies is using a data processing engine that analyzing more than two petabytes of data related to web security threats as the foundation underpinning its Cloud Security Solutions.

Akamai said it uses the resulting intelligence to continuously update and improve its "Kona Site Defender" application security rule set.  It is also using the intelligence as the framework for new services:

Kona Client Reputation: Akamai's view of web traffic gives the company access to more web client data than any other security provider. That data, combined with a proprietary query language and advanced heuristics and algorithms creates a reputation "score" for every IP address that crosses the platform. As important, this score can adapt over time, based on ongoing data analysis of IP address activity. Potentially hazardous traffic is classified as DDoS attackers, vulnerability scanners, web attackers or web scrapers and further rated according to the likelihood of danger associated with the client. The rating system is specifically designed to give security professionals greater insight and flexibility in defining which clients to block and which to let through. Further, by injecting scores into request headers, Kona Client Reputation data can feed into back-end security systems. Internal testing of Kona Client Reputation shows the solution is able to stop an average of up to eight times as many malicious requests than using Kona Site Defender alone. Kona Client Reputation is deployed as an add‑on option to Akamai Kona Site Defender.

Improved Kona Rule Set: Responding to a consistently evolving threat landscape requires the agility to quickly block malicious activity without hampering legitimate traffic. Already proven to deliver industry leading false positive and false negative rates, the improved Kona Rule Set has been developed based on ongoing analysis of more than two Petabytes of security-related data delivered by Akamai Cloud Security Intelligence and conducted by Akamai's threat research team. The resulting Kona Rule Set, which is available to all Kona Site Defender customers at no additional cost, has shown an approximately 30 percent decrease in reporting false positives and false negatives, helping security professionals ensure that more malicious traffic is being blocked while at the same time allowing more legitimate traffic to pass.

"Companies around the world have come to rely on Akamai's Cloud Security Solutions to keep their web sites and applications not only up and running, but also highly performant, in the face of attack," explained John Summers, vice president, Cloud Security, Akamai. "The Akamai Cloud Security Intelligence data analysis engine provides a solid foundation from which we're able to make our existing Akamai Cloud Security Solutions even smarter and provide a framework upon which new cloud security solutions can be built. The ultimate goal is to continue delivering technology designed to keep our customers' online businesses protected in the face of an ever changing threat landscape."

http://www.akamai.com

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Akamai Acquires Octoshape for OTT Optimization

Akamai Technologies has acquired Octoshape, a cloud OTT IPTV service provider that focuses on delivering broadcast, enterprise, and carrier solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Octoshape's services are designed to help optimize the quality of video streams for over-the-top (OTT) content and to enable Internet Protocol television (IPTV) solutions. Octoshape uses a combination of patented video and network optimization technologies for the delivery of video streams across the Internet using standard media formats and players. The privately-held company has approximately 40 employees.

"As more video gets consumed over the Internet, and on devices that can display higher-quality resolution, it is important for us to develop new ways to acquire, transform and distribute the highest-quality media for broadcast-size audiences," said Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai. "We are working to continue to extend our platform to accommodate video throughput increases that come from the adoption of 4K, and to support a potential 100-1000X increase in network traffic in the future."

http://www.octoshape.com
http://www.akamai.net

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Akamai Acquires Xerocole

Akamai Technologies acquired Xerocole, a provider of recursive DNS functionality.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

Xerocole's intelligent recursive DNS technology was designed to provide carriers with security, speed, and the ability to dynamically and flexibly set DNS policy and user preferences.

Akamai said the deal enables it to expand its DNS product portfolio beyond the company's existing 

Authoritative DNS products to more completely meet the needs of customers and network partners.

"We see this acquisition as an important investment in engineering talent and technology that is intended to complement our DNS product portfolio and strategy," said Rick McConnell, Akamai's President of Products and Development. "We believe that Xerocole has some of the best DNS experts in the industry and that recursive DNS has strategic value to the Akamai Platform and to each of our business units. Xerocole's technology is expected to strengthen our value to our major carrier and network partners."

http://www.akamai.com 

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Akamai Posts Q4 Revenue of $536 Million up 23% YoY

Akamai Technologies reported Q4 2014 revenue of 2014 was $536 million, a 23% increase over fourth quarter 2013 revenue of $436 million, and a 25% increase when adjusted for foreign exchange. Total revenue for 2014 was $1,964 million, a 24% increase over 2013 revenue of $1,578 million, and a 25% increase when adjusted for foreign exchange.  GAAP net income for the fourth quarter of 2014 was $97 million, or $0.54 per diluted share, an increase from prior quarter's GAAP net income of $91 million, and a 21% increase over fourth quarter 2013 GAAP net income of $80 million, or $0.44 per diluted share.

"Akamai's strong fourth quarter performance capped off a record year on both the top and bottom line," said Dr. Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai.  "Our strong revenue results continued to be driven by solid performance across all our geographies and all of our major product lines, with very strong growth coming from our Security and Media products. As we look forward to 2015, we expect to continue investing in the business with the goals of building out our network, expanding sales capacity, deepening channel relationships and accelerating innovation to help our customers secure and grow their on-line businesses."

http://www.akamai.com

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Juniper and Akamai Demo Elastic CDN based on NFV

At the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress  in Dusseldorf, Juniper Networks and Akamai Technologies are showing an Elastic Content Delivery Network (CDN) that could prove to be a more flexible solution for scaling video delivery.

The proof-of-concept demonstration uses Akamai’s virtualized Aura Licensed CDN (LCDN) software and Juniper's Contrail Controller for SDN and network function virtualization (NFV) to dynamically scale up and down network resources to support content spikes resulting from the broadcast of large events. The technology is also designed to accelerate service creation for service providers utilizing CDNs to launch innovative multiscreen video services that help drive subscriber acquisition and loyalty.

“Content delivery networks are evolving to meet the needs of increasingly real-time, distributed applications and users. Overlay networks have proven to simplify and automate the delivery of application and user-centric services without the administrative overhead of traditional infrastructure approaches. By combining Akamai’s virtualized caching components with Contrail’s scale-out network service automation, the companies have created a truly elastic CDN solution to meet the emerging needs of telco clouds,” stated Jennifer Lin, senior director product management, Juniper Networks.

http://www.juniper.net
http://www.akamai.com

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DE-CIX Lands Akamai in its NYC Data Center

DE-CIX North America, the U.S. arm of the German Internet exchange operator, confirmed Akamai as the first customer turned up on its Internet exchange, DE-CIX New York. Service turn-up for Akamai occurred last week at DE-CIX’s Internet exchange at its 111 8th Ave. access site in New York City. Akamai’s connection to DE-CIX New York follows a long-term partnership; Akamai has also used DE-CIX’s services in Europe and the Middle East.

“Our company was founded in 1998 to solve the problem of the ‘World Wide Wait,’” says Steven J. Schecter, Senior Manager, Network Architecture  for Akamai. “Akamai’s Intelligent Platform is a leading cloud platform for delivering high-performing user experiences to any device, anywhere.  It reaches globally and delivers locally. Having this new Internet exchange in New York will enable us to connect with other peering partners across a resilient Ethernet platform. DE-CIX is helping us to make good on our customer promise to deliver Internet content intelligently.”

http://nyc.de-cix.net

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