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Akamai Identified as a Leader Among Zero Trust Providers by Independent Research Firm

We are pleased to share that Akamai has been identified as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q4 2019.

In the report, Forrester evaluated how each vendor’s portfolio maps and delivers on specific components of the Zero Trust eXtended (ZTX) framework.

Akamai received highest possible scores in the following criteria:

  • Workload Security
  • People/Workforce Security
  • Zero Trust Vision and Strategy
  • Zero Trust Advocacy
  • Market Approach

In addition, Akamai’s Zero Trust Roadmap and Differentiation, Automation and Orchestration, and Network Security criteria were among the second-highest scores.

“Akamai enhances Zero Trust for critical users.” — Forrester Research

Akamai’s continued investment in building compelling security capabilities at the edge enables us to lead the security market and positions us as a strategic security partner for a large number of our customers. We believe the report reinforces this, further stating that “Akamai’s approach to eliminating the VPN and making security more ‘baked in’ for their customers, with a focus on mitigating the threats that proliferate across enterprises via shared credentials and excessive accesses, is well aimed to solve the crux of the problem.”

At Akamai, we believe security should 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 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 committed to helping our customers adopt a Zero Trust security posture, while also documenting and sharing lessons learned from our own Zero Trust journey. As the Forrester report highlights,

Akamai is one of the genuine true believers in the Zero Trust framework. Akamai is also one of the few vendors that has not only embraced Zero Trust as part of their go-to-market, but is also deeply engaged on their own internal Zero Trust journey. The vendor published their own Zero Trust learning and education course to help familiarize their customers and the industry on the benefits and specifics of the strategy.

Akamai’s approach to providing Zero Trust Access — predicated on our globally distributed, Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) at the edge — affords many architectural advantages. Consumed as a cloud service, Akamai’s platform provides clientless and client-based access to specific corporate applications based on a multitude of security signals, including:

  • Identity and contextual signals such as time of day, location, specific URL and HTTP method, user agent string, authentication state, MFA, group membership, etc.
  • Device signals such as presence/validity of a client certificate, OS version, auto update, disk encryption, firewall status, etc.
  • Threat protection signals from EDRs like Carbon Black or Akamai’s own Enterprise Threat Protector

A key benefit of Akamai’s IAP architecture is that organizations can not only enforce access, but can easily insert other Akamai services, such as application acceleration and security. This approach to Zero Trust security ultimately reduces risk by strictly limiting application access and protecting applications and end users from advanced threats — all while improving their user experience.

A complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q4 2019 is available for download here.

For additional information regarding Akamai’s approach to Zero Trust, visit akamai.com/zerotrust. Or, to learn about our security journey, watch Akamai’s Sr. Director of IT Risk and Security discuss why and how Akamai embraced a Zero Trust security posture.


*** 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/yqdKQzcasrA/akamai-identified-as-a-leader-among-zero-trust-providers-by-independent-research-firm.html