Akamai Identified As A Strong Performer Among Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Providers By Independent Research Firm

We are pleased to share that today Akamai has been cited as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Providers, Q4 2018 evaluation. In the report, Forrester evaluated how each vendor’s portfolio maps and delivers on specific components of the ZTX framework.

Akamai received highest scores across network and workload security. In addition, Akamai’s Zero Trust eXtended vision and strategy, road map and differentiation and people/workforce security received high scores.

“Akamai is a powerhouse of capability in the network security space and has spent both time and resources in extending its capabilities into other areas of security for clients. This includes areas such as DDoS, botnet mitigation, malware protection and application micro-segmentation capabilities,” states the report.

Akamai’s continued investment in building compelling security capabilities at the Edge enables our leadership in the security market and our ability to be a strategic security partner for a large number of our customers. To further reinforce that point, the report also states Akamai “… has a well-established global customer base across multiple verticals and a broad partner ecosystem.” It is this broad, global customer base that is the cornerstone of our security intelligence derived from our visibility into attacks targeted at leading organizations across the globe. This insight across application layer, volumetric, and malware attacks informs our automated attack detection and prevention capabilities at the Edge.

Effective attack mitigation and application access is only one aspect of Zero Trust, the other is how to more effectively offload the perpetually resource-constrained security and IT teams. The Forrester Wave™ report highlights: “Akamai security solutions are delivered as SaaS services and provide a wide range of configuration options.” At Akamai, we believe that security can be consumed as a service at the Edge, with all of the associated benefits in terms of opex, deployment, maintenance, high availability, and scale. As we all know, virtual or hardware appliances no longer make sense in today’s environment of overextended teams, rampant technical security debt and complexity, and sophisticated and massive attacks.

As a company, Akamai is also committed to not only documenting our own Zero Trust journey, but also helping our customers adopt a Zero Trust security architecture by leveraging our integrated platform of services at the Edge. As the report highlights: “[Akamai’s] understanding of the importance of Zero Trust is clearly evident.”

We believe Akamai’s approach to providing Zero Trust security focused on our globally distributed, Identity Aware Proxy (IAP) at the Edge, provides many architectural advantages to our customers. Consumed as a cloud service, Akamai’s platform provides clientless and client-based access to specific corporate applications based on successful authentication and authorization. A key advantage of Akamai’s IAP architecture is the ability for organizations to not only enforce access, but to also easily insert other Akamai services such as application acceleration, application security, and advanced malware protection. This approach to Zero Trust security ultimately helps reduce risk through strictly limiting application access and protecting end-users, all while helping to improve their user experience.

As our customer’s adopt a Zero Trust approach to security, use cases range from adaptive access to corporate applications across the digital ecosystem, to eliminating the VPN, to helping protect end-users from advanced threats, to transforming their corporate network based on application micro-segmentation and cloud-based threat protection.

For most, this is generally not an overnight project so coexistence with existing access methods, and integration with additional enterprise IT and security solutions through APIs, helps enable our customers to seamlessly and easily transition to a more effective security and access architecture based on Zero Trust principles.

Over the last year or so Akamai has also been recognized by Forrester as a “Leader” in its most recent Wave reports for DDoS Mitigation Solutions, Web Application Firewalls, and Bot Management.

A complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Providers Q4 2018 evaluation is available for download here.

For additional information regarding Akamai’s approach to Zero Trust, visit akamai.com/zerotrust, or to learn about our own Zero Trust security journey read Moving Beyond Perimeter Security: A comprehensive & achievable roadmap to less risk.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Akamai Blog authored by Lorenz Jakober. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAkamaiBlog/~3/hZNqBc9NgJ0/akamai-identified-as-a-strong-performer-among-zero-trust-extended-ecosystem-providers-by-independent.html