Last week a few of my colleagues and I flew out to Las Vegas to attend Akamai Edge 2012, Akamai’s annual customer conference. The event is a great opportunity to see the latest advancements in Akamai technology as well as network with Akamai partners, customers, and other Internet visionaries and find out how they are leveraging the cloud, mobile, and media.
After a few days of such conversations, it became abundantly clear: The Internet is moving forward at a rapid pace, and performance and security are top priorities for CIOs worldwide. For its part, Akamai presented an impressive new update suite of acceleration and security solutions to help allay some of these concerns.
Security threats such as DDoS attacks and SDoS (social media attacks) are top of mind for many organizations. Rightly so, considering the devastating impact an unmitigated attack can have on one’s system. What organizations will need to keep in mind as they test ways to deflect bigger and bigger attacks, is that size does matter. The size of your network, that is. Akamai is well-equipped to defend against even the largest DDoS attack in ways in almost no private enterprise website can do.
Another prevailing theme was how new protocols, like SPDY and WebSockets, will inevitably become mainstream in 2013, producing new challenges for tuning and optimizing application delivery. Application delivery and performance will also be tested as web usage moves away from traditional PCs and into the hands of users. A user will come to be universally defined as any device accessing your web with API and browser access.
The lightning-speed pace at which web app delivery and consumption are changing is keeping us all on our toes, and I’d say that we’re better off for it. We’re constantly innovating and seeking new partnerships that will allow us to quickly flex to meet and monitor these new standards (in terms of both technology and the status quo). The result is deeper and more accurate web performance insight and monitoring capabilities than ever before.
