The Akamai Blog

Eleven months ago, I joined Akamai as a result of the acquisition of a company I was partner of. The former company was small compared to Akamai, but had operations in several countries in the region, from Argentina to Mexico. In this company, we had been working with Akamai for 17 years, but on November 1, 2019, we officially became a part of the family.

The internet has become one of the most important access points in our daily lives. Unexpected surges in demand can slow web pages and create service outages for unprepared websites. A poor user experience leads to dissatisfied customers, making it more critical than ever to visualize and control online performance.

Google recently announced a proposed update to its search ranking algorithm: the Page Experience Update. This change, which launches in 2021, includes more performance signals in the ranking algorithm. A subtle but important feature of the update is that AMP will no longer be a requirement for promotion to Top Stories -- fast pages are all you need!

Welcome to day two of the Akamai Platform Update! Today, we're focusing on Akamai's edge delivery products as well as other complimentary products that help drive great digital experiences. The last several months have been nothing short of unprecedented as lockdowns, quarantines, and other protective measures enacted by governments and organizations drove a sudden and dramatic shift in user behavior, which in turn has driven enormous traffic levels. Akamai's importance has never been more evident as companies continue to rely on the intelligent edge platform to maintain business continuity and support the unprecedented traffic demand from online audiences. Regardless of the type of content, be it websites, apps, APIs, video, software, or smaller objects, Akamai's comprehensive set of content delivery products -- including Ion, Adaptive Media Delivery, and Download Delivery -- are designed to deliver great digital experiences for every user, regardless of location, device, or network.

The October 2020 release marks the culmination of a large number of updates to mPulse, Akamai's real user monitoring (RUM) solution:

According to a 2020 State of the Cloud Report, 61% of organizations plan to focus on cloud migration this year and 93% have a multi-cloud strategy. This means that on average your organization is using 2.2 public clouds, multiplying your complexity and costs.

Next year is shaping up to be a big one for live streaming. Typically characteristic of even years, when many major international sporting events take place, 2021 looks like it could defy the trend. Akamai is predicting an unprecedented surge in live streaming that will start in late 2020 and continue throughout 2021. During this stretch, we could realistically see 50 million people concurrently streaming a single live event. That's roughly double the largest number of viewers we've seen during a single event in the past. With this in mind, Akamai has used much of 2020 to prepare new capabilities included in the Akamai Platform Update that will help customers prepare for this surge in live streaming.

As campaigns and digital experiences become more individualized, they can create a challenge for delivering content to consumers at the highest velocity. Having each paid search, social media, and email marketing campaign add unique query string parameters to requests is critical for tracking the ROI of a company's marketing spend. This pursuit of granular user data can place a stubborn limit on the ability of B2C companies to maximize the benefits of cached content -- particularly in terms of maximizing offload of content delivery.

Welcome to the Akamai October 2020 Update - a week of product updates, new features, and innovations. We'll be highlighting a different area of our portfolio each day this week. In today's post, we look at our enhanced edge computing capabilities and how they help developers more effectively and rapidly improve customer experiences on the Akamai platform.

Television remotes have gotten little attention as a potential attack vector – despite being one of the most common household devices you can find.

At Akamai, we talk a lot about DDoS attacks. It's because we're pretty good at handling them. We've stopped many of the world's biggest attacks. And, while less common, they get a lot of attention. But we can also stop the world's smallest attacks. And we stop lots of them. It's these smaller attacks that we're talking about today.

As a region, it's very diverse and dynamic, with a lot to experience. Although I'm based in the Beijing office, I have opportunities to collaborate closely with my colleagues in Japan, India, Singapore and Australia. We find synergies and uniqueness in each market, and constantly share ideas and best practices. It's fun, but it's also an enriching learning experience to live and work in such an exciting region.

People depend on the internet for just about everything: interacting, learning, transacting, traveling, working, and more. At the same time, the wireless evolution to 4G -- and soon 5G and Wi-Fi everywhere -- has given birth to an era of connected cars, smart sensors, and a multitude of other "things" that are growing rapidly and expanding in utility and scope. Leading network providers see new market opportunities with new business models to monetize new services that combine networks and commerce, including:

My heritage is Sri Lankan. But, at the age of 15 I moved to France as a refugee, fleeing a civil war. Starting a new life from scratch in France, without speaking French, was certainly an interesting journey. But I was lucky enough to have support from my parents. They lived by the mantra of "when there's a will, there's a way". And that helped get me into the French education system, where I completed high school and University, before moving to the UK to start my professional career in IT.

If you told me at the beginning of 2020 that I'd be cycling 250 miles in the remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan, fundraising for an organization called "Climate Ride", and wearing a face mask to go grocery shopping - I would not have believed you. Yet, since March 2020, we've all been living the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic. Social distancing, total lock-down for some, living and working from home, and dealing with a narrowed life experience.

The FBI has released a flash warning that thousands of organizations around the world, and across multiple industries, have been threatened with DDoS attacks unless they pay a bitcoin ransom. This ransom DDoS, or RDoS, threat was covered by Akamai's Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT) in a Security Alert released on August 17, 2020.

As JavaScript-based client-side attacks continue to evolve, we see how attackers are getting more sophisticated and employing more advanced techniques. Unfortunately, it has been proven many times that any website partner can be exploited to carry out an attack. In the past month, we witnessed one of the most popular and trusted vendors being used as a credit card data exfiltration vector -- Google Analytics.

SQL injections were first discovered in 1998, and over 20 years later, they remain an unsolved challenge and an ongoing threat for every web application and API. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) highlighted injection flaws in its Top 10 lists for both web application security risks and API security threats.

It's no secret that security threats continue to expand in volume and variety, making headlines on virtually a daily basis. From nation-state attacks, corporate espionage, and data exfiltration campaigns to all-in-one and sneaker bot campaigns, businesses across the globe find themselves dealing with a deluge of inbound threats. The increased amount and variation of threats, and the proliferation of apps being deployed and managed by teams and individuals across the enterprise, can make securing apps and data feel like trying to keep water out of a submerged sieve.

To attract and retain customers, you must offer an exceptional digital experience. In an increasingly competitive business climate, organizations are fighting to maintain loyalty and keep users engaged online. The cost of switching is low, consumers are transient, and user expectations for how digital experiences should perform have never been higher.