At Akamai, our mission is to protect life online by defending organizations across the globe from the most advanced and dangerous cyberthreats. As part of that mission, we are constantly evolving our platform and investing in our frontline responders to outmatch the latest threats and cybercriminals. Today, we are excited to announce a significant evolution of Akamai’s distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection solution, Prolexic, with the launch of our new sixth-generation platform — a fully software-defined, high-performance, scalable infrastructure that further strengthens our ability to serve evolving customer needs and the future demands of cybersecurity.
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This platform evolution cements Prolexic’s status as the most trusted provider of DDoS protection and delivers immediate value to our customers in the form of:
- Advanced DDoS protection against the largest, most complex threats
- Dedicated 20 Tbps total mitigation capacity in 2023
- A global presence with 36 scrubbing centers by 2023 across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Oceana, and the Middle East.
Threat landscape
DDoS threats are evolving rapidly, dramatically increasing risk for businesses without the proper defenses. Since 2020, we have seen a deluge of DDoS extortion, record-setting 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 account 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 strengthen 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.”
Changes in the threat landscape are fueled in part by the evolving needs of modern enterprises, including growing requirements for hybrid deployments, expanded global presence, and significantly increased bandwidth support. In response to these shifts, cybercriminals are evolving their methodologies and launching attacks that are not only large in size but also heavily distributed, targeted, longer lasting, and technically complex. In other words, they are eager to exploit the weaknesses in an organization’s security architecture and posture that result from inconsistent security policies and requirements, as well as the challenges associated with troubleshooting across fragmented infrastructure.
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Prolexic platform evolution
Akamai Prolexic has a rich history of market-changing innovation, which enables us to stay ahead of these intensifying DDoS threats and provide enterprises with the highest levels of protection. Over the past 20 years, Prolexic has led the industry to deliver the most robust and most trusted DDoS protection platform that keeps businesses safe. The Prolexic legacy includes:
- Expanding from a single Security Operations Command Center to more than 225 eyes-on-glass frontline responders across six global locations
- Being the first DDoS protection platform to deliver 1 Tbps dedicated attack-fighting capacity and later increasing that to 10 Tbps
- Providing the industry’s only 100% availability SLA
Looking to the future, Prolexic is shifting to a fully software-defined architecture in response to changing network trends related to edge computing, 5G, and network virtualization. Traditionally, we have deployed native Akamai technologies on state-of-the-art networking components from purpose-built third-party vendors to defend against attacks, which required us to align closely with the vendor product lifecycle, hardware availability, capacity, and capabilities. With the transition to virtualized software environments, we moved our network service chaining to a software environment running on standard hyperscale compute data centers. This standardization of deployment across the board empowers us to serve evolving customer needs faster, facilitate modular deployments for capacity extension, provide better regional coverage with low-latency links, and improve redundancy of the platform.
The platform advancement not only makes deploying and maintaining multiple Tbps of dedicated attack bandwidth simple, but also dramatically accelerates our time to market, which will allow us to deliver new cybersecurity innovations faster and more frequently.
Capacity and geo-expansion
Prolexic’s next-generation platform offers numerous benefits, the most immediate being a 100% increase in dedicated attack mitigation capacity (20 Tbps by 2023). 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.
Additionally, as DDoS attacks evolve globally, Prolexic is making investments to enhance regional cyber defenses and onboarding by delivering unmatched, highly performant security to strategic local markets throughout 2023, including:
- North America (East/West United States, Canada)
- Europe (Italy, Spain, Switzerland)
- Asia (India, Japan, Hong Kong)
- Middle East
Thanks to our proprietary GRE-based Prolexic Routed technology, customers will be able to seamlessly connect with the new sites without requiring any action. In addition, with the benefit of virtual delivery paths provided with GRE from every scrubbing center, customers will have exponentially higher diversity for traffic delivery as we add sites to our platform — 500+ delivery paths for an average customer configuration — providing optimal performance, stability, and resilience.
Future innovation
The latest upgrade to Akamai Prolexic provides a strong foundation for future cybersecurity innovations, including enhanced detection and mitigation, cutting-edge deployment methodologies, expanded self-service controls, and other value-added capabilities beyond DDoS.
In today’s unpredictable world, having a proven DDoS mitigation strategy in place is imperative for shielding your business from downtime and disruption. At Akamai, we believe our unique combination of a battle-tested platform, seasoned security experts, and honed attack-fighting processes continues to be the best approach for mitigating DDoS risk, and making the internet a safer place.
Prolexic platform evolution
Akamai Prolexic has a rich history of market-changing innovation, which enables us to stay ahead of these intensifying DDoS threats and provide enterprises with the highest levels of protection. Over the past 20 years, Prolexic has led the industry to deliver the most robust and most trusted DDoS protection platform that keeps businesses safe. The Prolexic legacy includes:
- Expanding from a single Security Operations Command Center to more than 225 eyes-on-glass frontline responders across six global locations
- Being the first DDoS protection platform to deliver 1 Tbps dedicated attack-fighting capacity and later increasing that to 10 Tbps
- Providing the industry’s only 100% availability SLA
Looking to the future, Prolexic is shifting to a fully software-defined architecture in response to changing network trends related to edge computing, 5G, and network virtualization. Traditionally, we have deployed native Akamai technologies on state-of-the-art networking components from purpose-built third-party vendors to defend against attacks, which required us to align closely with the vendor product lifecycle, hardware availability, capacity, and capabilities. With the transition to virtualized software environments, we moved our network service chaining to a software environment running on standard hyperscale compute data centers. This standardization of deployment across the board empowers us to serve evolving customer needs faster, facilitate modular deployments for capacity extension, provide better regional coverage with low-latency links, and improve redundancy of the platform.
The platform advancement not only makes deploying and maintaining multiple Tbps of dedicated attack bandwidth simple, but also dramatically accelerates our time to market, which will allow us to deliver new cybersecurity innovations faster and more frequently.
Capacity and geo-expansion
Prolexic’s next-generation platform offers numerous benefits, the most immediate being a 100% increase in dedicated attack mitigation capacity (20 Tbps by 2023). 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.
Additionally, as DDoS attacks evolve globally, Prolexic is making investments to enhance regional cyber defenses and onboarding by delivering unmatched, highly performant security to strategic local markets throughout 2023, including:
- North America (East/West United States, Canada)
- Europe (Italy, Spain, Switzerland)
- Asia (India, Japan, Hong Kong)
- Middle East
Thanks to our proprietary GRE-based Prolexic Routed technology, customers will be able to seamlessly connect with the new sites without requiring any action. In addition, with the benefit of virtual delivery paths provided with GRE from every scrubbing center, customers will have exponentially higher diversity for traffic delivery as we add sites to our platform — 500+ delivery paths for an average customer configuration — providing optimal performance, stability, and resilience.
Future innovation
The latest upgrade to Akamai Prolexic provides a strong foundation for future cybersecurity innovations, including enhanced detection and mitigation, cutting-edge deployment methodologies, expanded self-service controls, and other value-added capabilities beyond DDoS.
In today’s unpredictable world, having a proven DDoS mitigation strategy in place is imperative for shielding your business from downtime and disruption. At Akamai, we believe our unique combination of a battle-tested platform, seasoned security experts, and honed attack-fighting processes continues to be the best approach for mitigating DDoS risk, and making the internet a safer place.
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