Akamai Expands Managed Security Services

Akamai this week announced it has added a secure web gateway capability to its portfolio of managed security services, while at the same time extending the reach of its service for mitigating the impact of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack to public clouds.

The secure web gateway capability is achieved using either a lightweight client installed on endpoints or by forwarding traffic from an existing proxy to the Enterprise Threat Protector (ETS) service provided by Akamai. All traffic will then be compared against real-time DNS and URL threat intelligence services, which can be employed to block a huge amount of malicious traffic before an IP connection is ever made. Inline payload analysis engines now also provide offline scanning for larger files as well as a sandbox for further analysis when required.

At launch, Akamai expects to have Enterprise Threat Protector proxy servers in 56 cities and 29 countries, with additional deployments scheduled for the remainder of 2020. That approach will enable Akamai to overcome any latency historically associated with relying on a web gateway access via a cloud service. The Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform cloud security platform currently consists of more than 250,000 servers attached to 1,500 networks located in 150 countries and can be activated in minutes, versus having to wait on IT teams to acquire, install and test a web gateway.

Akamai is also extending the reach of its Prolexic Routed service for scrubbing IT environments to help mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to public clouds.

Renny Shen, director of product marketing for Intelligent Edge Platform at Akamai, said now that cloud service providers have been enabling end customers to “bring your own IP” capabilities to their clouds, it now makes sense to extend the Prolexic Routed purpose-built DDoS scrubbing service to public clouds.

Previously, Prolexic Routed was only available for on-premises IT environments where IT organizations had retained control over BGP routing.

Collectively, the services that make up the elements of the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform cloud security platform are designed to provide IT organizations with access to a zero-trust network that Akamai manages on their behalf. That approach should make it easier for IT organizations to securely scale network resources up and down without being dependent on traditional virtual private networks (VPNs) that are cumbersome to deploy and manage.

It’s not clear how many organizations have increased their reliance on managed security services providers (MSSPs) to compensate for their own lack of cybersecurity expertise, but with more cybersecurity professionals working from home for the next few months as the COVID-19 pandemic rages it’s likely more organizations will look to external service providers to augment whatever existing capabilities they have. After all, cybersecurity professionals working from home are likely to be subject to distractions. In contrast, most MSSPs are a little further down the path toward relying on highly distributed workforces.

Of course, when it comes to working remotely, most cybercriminals will have yet another advantage, given the fact that most of them already work remotely.

Michael Vizard

Avatar photo

Michael Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

mike-vizard has 745 posts and counting.See all posts by mike-vizard