Akamai prioritises the future demands of cyber customers
Akamai prioritises the future demands of cyber customers
Steve Winterfeld of Akamai discusses the company ’ s university-based founding and how it merged into a leading multibillion-dollar cybersecurity firm
Akamai was founded following a competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ), entered by its co-Founder and CEO Frank Thomson Leighton — Dr Tom Leighton . Since that time , the organisation has expanded massively , and in the words of Steve Winterfeld , Advisory CISO at Akamai , the company “ continues to solve hard problems .”
The cybersecurity company plays a critical role for corporations as it focuses on the future , to determine whether threat motivation will change and how to best combat ransomware attacks , state-sponsored DDoS attacks , and ransomware that could turn into wiperware .
“ Those are real concerns , and we ’ re keeping an eye out for those . And so we have probably 15 security capabilities backed up by services , responding to customers ’ needs and rapidly growing on the edge compute and cloud side .”
“ We started out with a web application , or as it is more commonly called now , web application and API protection , and expanded into protecting the infrastructure against DDoS to include the DNS infrastructure and recently added internal infrastructure protection and visibility through micro-segmentation ,” explains Winterfeld .
Responding to the cybersecurity needs of the customer
As an established cybersecurity organisation , Akamai can now focus on what customers need .
Winterfeld explains that , in response to its clients ’ feedback , the company has been acquiring the necessary assets and tools to fulfil those needs with the recent purchase of Guardicore . Guardicore ’ s leading microsegmentation products will be added to Akamai ’ s comprehensive portfolio of Zero Trust solutions to protect enterprises from damage caused by breaches like ransomware , while safeguarding the critical assets at the core of the network .
“ We bought Linode , which is a cloud provider . And so now we have an integrated platform to build and perform on as well as secure .”
A prime example of Akamai ’ s ability to meet customer demands , particularly in high-risk environments , is its partnership with First Bank , which is “ very concerned about its real-time visibility into its network . We ’ re partnering with them on a software-based microsegmentation , where they ’ re able to see those data flows and create segments .”