Akamai and Bell: Securing and accelerating content

Tony Lauro is Director, Security Technology and Strategy at Akamai Technologies - the world’s first content delivery network upon its founding in 1998. “The co-founders of Akamai said that as the internet starts to grow, it will be almost impossible to have a single or even a cluster of servers handle the traffic from multi-millions of connections coming in. The solution was edge servers, and we've deployed over 250,000 of them geographically dispersed around the world closest to where the pockets of internet users are.”

“We see about 25 to 30% of the world's web traffic every day come across our platform,” says Lauro. “There's major insights there that we can take to let us say this is bad traffic based on X, Y and Z. Over the years, we've expanded into protecting businesses from downtime against cyberattacks as well as enterprise services to make sure that employees working from home can do so securely.”

The company’s relationship with Bell Canada extends back to 2016, with the partnership highlighting the key competencies of both businesses. “Some of the things we've been doing include accelerating content,” says Lauro. “We deliver live streaming services for Bell Raptors content. The Akamai platform is able to accelerate that content and make sure it's highly available for all the devices that want to stream it.” Like many companies, its customers want more content, on more devices, anywhere and at any time. “We're helping support that mission of Bell Canada and also supporting the needs of the internet at large.”

Akamai’s solutions for remote working involve expanding a Zero Trust methodology. “That’s a SASE model which effectively says, as you connect from the outside and you come to the inside to an application, you're not going from untrusted to trusted. Everything is considered untrusted. So instead of providing network connectivity to access an internal application, you're just providing an application experience.”

Lauro sees that change to remote work as being a continuing trend for the Akamai-Bell partnership to respond to. “Companies are asking: how do you securely monitor the user experience that users are having while they work remotely? How do you monitor security on those devices to make sure that any corporate data is not compromised? The remote work model, alongside the digital transformation of all the other services that organisations are already trying to, is going to continue to grow and be a key driver in the year ahead.”