Akamai unveils next generation DDoS defense platform
Akamai Technologies has announced a significant evolution of its DDoS protection platform Prolexic, with a global rollout of new, fully software-defined scrubbing centres, which will extend its dedicated defense capacity to 20 Tbps and accelerate future product innovations.
In the wake of increasingly sophisticated and record-setting DDoS attacks worldwide, the move further enables Akamai Prolexic to defend customers from the largest, multi-terabit attacks and provide better performance and reliability for online businesses of any size.
Akamai says new and additional globally distributed scrubbing centres analyse incoming traffic, identify threats and remove malicious activities to prevent downtime for end users or networks. The centres are fully software-defined and facilitate rapid deployments for capacity extension, better regional coverage and improved redundancy.
The initial rollout commences in the third quarter of 2022 and continues in 2023 with additional centres being deployed in all major regions, including North America (US-East/West, Canada), Europe (Italy, Spain, Switzerland), Asia (India, Japan, Hong Kong), and the Middle East.
DDoS threats are evolving rapidly, subjecting businesses without the proper defenses to considerable risk. Since 2020, organisations have experienced a deluge of DDoS extortion, high-profile, multi-terabit 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 todays top five accounted 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," says Sean Lyons, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Security at Akamai.
"This platform advancement drastically accelerates our time to market and will enable us to deliver new cybersecurity innovations with greater frequency," he says.
"In addition, our extension of defense capacity, regional presence and next generation scrubbing centres further strengthens our ability to mitigate all types and volumes of attacks," says Lyons.
"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."
According to Akamai, Akamai Prolexic stops attacks with a cloud-based DDoS scrubbing platform to protect applications wherever they are deployed, whether in a data centre, the public cloud, or a colocation facility. It provides comprehensive protection against the broadest range of DDoS attack types and defends against high-bandwidth sustained attacks, as well as todays complex multi-vector attacks that jump from application to application.
Akamai;s Prolexic includes proactive mitigation controls tailored to network traffic to stop attacks instantly, backed by active mitigation performed by Akamai's 24/7 global SOCC, and provides customers a unique 100% uptime Service Level Agreement.
