Akamai Technologies, Inc. (‘Akamai’) develops and provides solutions for global enterprises to build, secure, and accelerate their applications and digital experiences.
The company’s distributed global network consists of core and distributed compute sites, more than 4,300 edge points-of-presence in approximately 130 countries and over 700 cities, and its underlying global network is integrated with roughly 1,200 network partners.
Akamai has visibility and insight into traffic volumes, congest...
Akamai Technologies, Inc. (‘Akamai’) develops and provides solutions for global enterprises to build, secure, and accelerate their applications and digital experiences.
The company’s distributed global network consists of core and distributed compute sites, more than 4,300 edge points-of-presence in approximately 130 countries and over 700 cities, and its underlying global network is integrated with roughly 1,200 network partners.
Akamai has visibility and insight into traffic volumes, congestion, attack patterns, vulnerabilities, and other activities across the internet's complex intersections of networks and systems. Leveraging these insights, the company offers solutions designed to protect its customers from threats and attacks, along with full-stack compute solutions to build and deliver distributed, low-latency applications on its globally distributed network.
The company's strategy is to help continue to power and protect business online by offering security and compute services with reliability, scale, and expertise its customers need to grow their business with confidence.
Solutions
The company provides solutions in three core offerings: security, delivery, and compute. It also provides services and support for its customers as they utilize its solutions. Akamai is committed to enabling its customers to benefit from the latest technology developments. In recent years, artificial intelligence (‘AI’) has been a major focus of corporate initiatives for enterprises in multiple verticals and across the globe. To help its customers seize on the power and potential of AI, the company provides cloud computing infrastructure; cybersecurity solutions, powered by AI and automation, designed to defend against prompt injections, data exfiltration, and toxic outputs; generative AI to improve the speed and efficiency of identifying and investigating malicious or suspect activity; and throughput on its global intelligent network to enable the large volumes of data required to power AI-powered applications and facilitate effective real-time protections.
Security
The company's security solutions, threat intelligence, and global operations team work to provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications. Customers trust Akamai to help keep infrastructure, websites, applications, application programming interfaces (‘APIs’), networks, and users safe from a multitude of cyberattacks and online threats while improving performance. With insight and automation derived from its distributed global network, the company’s solutions blend robust automation with customizable protections and managed security services to enable businesses to effectively manage risk and maximize protections. Akamai’s web application and API protection solutions protect web, API, and mobile app traffic from attacks that take advantage of security flaws, protection from malicious automated attacks, credential abuse, and account takeover, as well as client-side protections that protect end customers from malicious or vulnerable first- and third-party client-side scripts. As adversaries relentlessly refine their evasion techniques, it requires continuous innovation in threat detection and specialized defenses to stay ahead of advanced bot and abuse attacks. The company’s Bot & Abuse portfolio provides tailored, specialized solutions to help customers protect against these threats. Akamai Account Protector offers full account lifecycle protections, including the ability to defend against account takeover and opening abuse, adversarial bot protection, protection against credential stuffing, inventory scalping, and hoarding. Akamai Content Protector also helps businesses protect their intellectual property, reputation, and revenue potential with solutions designed to stop persistent scrapers from stealing content.
In June 2024, the company acquired Noname Security Ltd. (‘Noname Security’), one of the top API security vendors in the market. This enhanced Akamai’s API Security solution and accelerated its ability to meet growing customer demand and market requirements as the use of APIs continues to expand.
The company also offers microservice and application component protection that analyzes and protects application traffic that moves between application components like containers, APIs, and workloads. This is part of a growing set of solutions designed to help businesses implement a Zero Trust security architecture. Its acquisition of Guardicore Ltd. (‘Guardicore’) has enabled the company to deliver the Akamai Guardicore Platform, which simplifies enterprise security with broad visibility and granular controls through one console. The Akamai Guardicore Platform simply and efficiently enables Zero Trust through a fully integrated combination of microsegmentation, Zero Trust Network Access, multi-factor authentication, domain name system (‘DNS’) firewall, and threat hunting. Guardicore’s microsegmentation solution helps the company’s customers prevent malicious lateral movement in their network through precise segmentation policies, visuals of activity within their IT environment, and network security alerts. The platform leverages AI to simplify user experience, vulnerability assessments, compliance, and incident response, helping to protect businesses from the threat of ransomware. AI network labeling examines how assets are behaving and suggests labels to help security teams apply appropriate controls, and generative AI allows security professionals to ask natural language questions of their network, instead of manually poring through logs, to drastically expedite a variety of use cases like compliance scoping and incident response.
Compute
Akamai's cloud computing services, which it sometimes refers to as compute, include compute, storage, networking, database, and container management services that are required to build, deploy, and secure applications and workloads. The cloud computing services running on Akamai's compute platform enable companies to distribute workloads and applications across its core to edge infrastructure to help solve the cost, performance, and scale challenges that centralized cloud computing platforms present today.
The company has acquired Linode Limited Liability Company (‘Linode’), an established cloud computing platform. This acquisition was a significant milestone in its expansion into cloud computing. While Linode was traditionally focused on individual developers, the company is leveraging the Linode cloud computing services for enterprise customers by building new enterprise-grade core computing regions and connecting them to the Akamai network. Akamai provides a continuum of compute solutions for developers to build and deliver distributed, low-latency applications. It empowers businesses to build and deploy massively scalable applications, distribute them to reduce latency, and reach underserved locations, and works to optimize and secure experiences and data from the core to the digital touchpoint. Akamai’s compute solutions include a broad set of distributed cloud and edge computing services, including virtual machines, graphical processing units, cloud storage and databases, network optimization and security services, and lightweight serverless functions to help businesses build, deploy, and manage applications and workloads with superior performance and affordability on a distributed platform.
In 2024, the company expanded Akamai's compute platform to span several datacenters in various locations. This includes upgrades to some existing datacenters and the introduction of multiple datacenters. The locations of these datacenters include Denver, Colorado; Houston, Texas; Querétaro, Mexico; Bogotá, Colombia; Santiago, Chile; Marseille, France; Hamburg, Germany; Johannesburg, South Africa; Auckland, New Zealand; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Melbourne, Australia. Distributed compute regions provide access to powerful dedicated compute, storage, and networking services in major metros that lack cloud computing options and availability, enabling organizations to place compute-intensive workloads as close as possible to end users. These regions act as an extension of primary infrastructure deployed in core compute regions for organizations that aim to improve application performance to attract new customers in new or target regions, and/or stabilize performance. The company also introduced new NVIDIA graphics processing units (‘GPUs’) to provide better productivity and economics for companies in the media and entertainment industry that are challenged with processing video content faster and more efficiently, and for organizations seeking to deploy AI inferencing workloads closer to end users. These GPUs are well-suited for video transcoding and live video streaming, virtual reality and augmented reality content, gaming and graphics rendering, training and inference with neural networks, data analysis, and scientific computing, and high-performance computing applications, such as modeling and simulation, that require fast and efficient processing of large amounts of data.
In November 2024, the company launched the Akamai App Platform, a ready-to-run solution that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale distributed applications. The Akamai App Platform is built on top of the cloud-native Kubernetes technology Otomi, which the company acquired from Red Kubes Holding B.V. and its subsidiary earlier in the year. The application platform provides ready-to-run templates that address common challenges in deploying, managing, and scaling Kubernetes clusters at scale. Instead of relying on multiple departments and spending months sourcing, connecting, and configuring the software needed to operate Kubernetes fleets, Akamai’s solution automates the provisioning process, allowing developers to build and deploy distributed applications in a few clicks.
Delivery
The company's delivery solutions consist primarily of web and mobile performance-focused solutions and media delivery solutions. Its web and mobile performance solutions are architected to enable dynamic websites and applications to have rapid response times, no matter where the user is, what device or browser they are using, or how they are connected to the internet. These services leverage intelligent performance optimization and real-time monitoring, origin offload, and network reliability and insights that enable enterprises to identify and address performance issues. Akamai web and mobile performance capabilities also include global traffic management, site acceleration, application load balancing, large-scale load testing, and real-user monitoring.
The company’s media delivery solutions are designed to enable enterprises to execute their digital media distribution strategies by addressing volume and global reach requirements, improving the end-user experience, boosting reliability, and reducing the cost of internet-related infrastructure. Underlying these solutions is technology to address variable connection speeds and device types, facilitate access to disparate locations around the world, accelerate large file downloads, reliably deliver high-quality live content across various devices and platforms, and enable comprehensive insights and real-time online video monitoring. Akamai media delivery solutions include video streaming and video player services, game and software delivery, broadcast operations, authoritative DNS, resolution, and data and analytics.
Services and Support
The company provides an array of service and support offerings across its core offerings. Through its service and support offerings, it works closely with its customers to develop creative and tailored solutions to assist them with integrating, configuring, optimizing, and managing its core offerings. Additional features are available to enterprises that purchase its premium and managed security solutions, including a dedicated technical account team, proactive service monitoring, custom technical support handling, security traffic monitoring, technical security reviews, threat advisories, and emergency support for security events.
Customers
The company’s customers include many corporations, such as Adobe, Aflac, Airbnb, Asus, Autodesk, Carnival Corporation, The Coca-Cola Company, Comcast, Daiwa Institute of Research, eBay, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Fidelity Investments, Honda, Japan Airlines, Liberty Mutual, Maersk Transportation & Logistics, Marriott, NBCUniversal, Panasonic, Panera Bread, Paramount Global, Philips, Rabobank, Riot Games, Sony Interactive Entertainment, RTL, Spotify, Telefonica, Toshiba, Ubisoft, WarnerMedia, and The Washington Post. It also actively sells to government agencies. As of December 31, 2024, the company’s public-sector customers included the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Sales, Services, and Marketing
The company markets and sells its solutions globally through its field sales and services organization and through many channel partners, including Apukay, AT&T, Avant, BV Tech, Carahsoft, CPD, Deloitte, Deutsche Telecom, Doyen, Kyndryl, Macnica, Microsoft Azure, Netpoleon, Telefonica Group, and WWT. In addition to entering into agreements with resellers, it has several other types of sales and marketing-focused alliances with entities, such as system integrators, application service providers, technology solution distributors, referral partners, and marketplaces. The company’s sales, services, and marketing professionals are based in locations across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific and focus on direct and channel sales, sales operations, professional services, account management, and technical consulting.
To support its sales efforts and promote the Akamai brand, the company conducts comprehensive marketing programs to shape perception and drive awareness and consideration of its solutions. Its integrated marketing strategies include public relations, digital programmatic advertising, paid search and SEO marketing, content marketing, social media, strategic alliances, e-mail marketing programs, events and webinars, participation at industry trade shows, and ongoing training and sales enablement.
Government Regulation
Privacy laws, such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, impact how the company uses data generated from its network, as well as its ability to reach current and prospective customers, understand how its solutions are being used, transfer data about its employees, and respond to customer requests allowed under the applicable laws.
The company is subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and similar anti-bribery laws, which generally prohibit companies and their intermediaries from offering payments or inducements to foreign government officials for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business. To the extent it exports technical services, data, products, or other technology outside of the U.S., the company is subject to the U.S. and international laws and regulations governing international trade and exports, including, but not limited to, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, the Export Administration Regulations, and sanctions against embargoed countries and other designated entities and individuals.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company owned, or had exclusive rights to, over 560 U.S. patents covering its technology, as well as patents issued by other countries. Its U.S.-issued patents have terms extendable to various dates between 2025 and 2043.
History
Akamai Technologies, Inc. was founded in 1998. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1998.