Akamai Extends Security Services to the Enterprise
Akamai today extended the reach of its managed security services beyond websites to include applications running in on-premises IT environments and in the cloud.
Lorenz Jakober, director of product marketing for Akamai, said the company’s Enterprise Defender service combined with the company’s existing managed security services will enable organizations to implement a zero-trust cybersecurity framework end to end.
Jakober said one of the biggest challenges enterprise IT organizations face is that it’s almost impossible for them to deploy and maintain cybersecurity policies consistently across heterogeneous environments. By extending the reach of the managed security services Akamai provides for websites into the realm of enterprise applications, Jakober said it’s now possible to deploy and manage cybersecurity policies across a heterogenous IT environment from within the same console.
That approach also has significant implications for advancing DevSecOps, added Jakober. Because Enterprise Defender provides a more agile way to apply policies, cybersecurity teams now will be able to keep pace with the rate at which developers that have embraced agile development methodologies are now building and deploying applications, he said, noting Enterprise Defender makes it possible to consistently apply one set of policies for application development that might be occurring in the cloud and in production systems running in an on-premises IT environment.
Relying on an Akamai service also shifts the place where much of the battle with cybercriminals occurs—on networks managed by Akamai versus systems managed in internal IT teams. That approach not only reduces the number of firewalls an enterprise IT organization may need to deploy, for example, it also serves to reduce the level of operational cybersecurity expertise required on the part of the enterprise. That approach can prove especially useful in enterprises that need to secure branch offices that are difficult for IT teams to remotely secure on their own.
Most enterprise IT organizations are still trying to determine what the right mix of internal and external cybersecurity expertise is for their organization. While just about every organization has identified cybersecurity as a top priority, every dollar spent on cybersecurity is a dollar taken away from other critical business functions. Akamai, in effect, is aggregating the cost of maintaining cybersecurity across a range of customers at a lower cost than most enterprise IT organizations could do on their own, said Jakober. Plus, Akamai has the financial wherewithal to apply machine- and deep-learning algorithms to massive amounts of data, which is required to apply artificial intelligence to cybersecurity effectively.
Akamai, of course, is not the only provider of a managed set of security services. But the company does benefit from having a highly distributed content delivery network (CDN) in place that allows it to discover new and emerging threats long before the average enterprise IT team.
Most IT teams naturally take a lot of pride in their own cybersecurity prowess. But as cybersecurity becomes more challenging to maintain with each passing day, many IT teams are resigning themselves to the idea that their cybersecurity pride comes before the perhaps-inevitable organizational fall.
— Michael Vizard
