Akamai

Introduction

Akamai is a cloud-based intelligent traffic manager that supports business continuity and your growing user base and uses load balancing to manage website and mobile performance demands.

Akamai helps Internet users access your website or IP applications with greater reliability. It applies an Internet-centric approach to global load balancing to increase site availability and responsiveness to online user requests. Unlike traditional hardware-based solutions that reside within data centers, the fault-tolerant GTM service makes intelligent routing decisions. These are based on real-time data center performance health and on global Internet conditions. They transport user requests to the appropriate data center based on the best Internet route for that user at that moment.

Brief History

Akamai’s beginnings lie in a challenge posed by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in early 1995. The father of the web foresaw the congestion that was soon to become very familiar to Internet users, and he challenged colleagues at MIT to invent a fundamentally new and better way to deliver Internet content. What he may not have foreseen was that posing the problem in an academic setting would ultimately result in a commercial service that has revolutionized the Internet.
MIT Professor of Applied Mathematics Tom Leighton, who had an office down the hall from Dr. Berners-Lee, was intrigued by the challenge. Dr. Leighton, a renowned expert on parallel algorithms and architecture was head of the Algorithms Group at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. Dr. Leighton recognized that a solution to web congestion could be found in applied mathematics and algorithms and he assembled a team of researchers to tackle the problem. After obtaining his undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics from the Technion, Danny Lewin came to MIT in the Fall of 1996 to work with Dr. Leighton. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Lewin began making rapid and important progress on a variety of techniques for improving Internet performance. Working with the team, Dr. Leighton and Mr. Lewin developed the mathematical algorithms necessary to intelligently route and replicate content over a large network of distributed servers, technology that would ultimately solve what was becoming a frustrating problem for Internet users.

Building a Business

In 1997, Dr. Leighton and Mr. Lewin began exploring the possible commercial use of their technology. Together with Preetish Nijhawan (a student at MIT’s Sloan school) they entered the esteemed annual MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition in September of that year. Over the course of the 9-month competition, the $50K team grew substantially and their business plan was selected as one of six finalists among 100 entries. The distinction signaled that Internet content delivery had serious market potential and on August 20, 1998, Dr. Leighton and Mr. Lewin incorporated Akamai, with Jonathan Seelig (a student at the Sloan school) and Randall Kaplan joining the founding team. Akamai obtained an exclusive license to certain intellectual property from MIT, and development efforts began in the fall of 1998. Most of the company’s early employees were students who had worked on the project at MIT.

In late 1998 and early 1999, experienced Internet business professionals joined the team. Most notably, Paul Sagan, who was a former President of Time Inc. New Media, a founder of Road Runner cable modem service and who helped launch NY 1 News, became chief operating officer and eventually president of Akamai (later serving as CEO from 2005 – 2013). George Conrades, former chairman and chief executive officer of BBN Corp. and senior vice president of U.S. Operations for IBM, assumed the helm as Akamai’s first chairman and chief executive officer in April 1999.

Launching Commercial Service

The company grew rapidly and delivered its first live traffic (a pixel buried deep in the Disney site) in February of 1999. In March, Akamai gained significant market exposure when it enabled the delivery of March Madness for ESPN and a Star Wars trailer for Entertainment Tonight, both of which experienced historic levels of user demand. Akamai launched commercial service in April 1999 and announced that one of the world’s most-trafficked web properties, Yahoo!, was a charter customer.

Features

Deliver content through a network of servers in a secure and efficient way.
Help reduce bandwith demands
Reduce bandwith and hosting cost for the site owner
Protect web apps and APIs.
Manage and defend against bots.
Prevent user account takeover.
Defend your site from client-side threats like data skimming.
Respond quickly to large DDoS attacks.
Implement secure, cloud-based identity management.
Conceal your web apps from the public Internet.

Strengths in CDN

Better performance
Increased reliability
Cost savings
Resilience againts cyber attacks

Strengths in Akamai

SWOT analysis

Successful track record of developing new products – product innovation.
Strong Brand Portfolio – Over the years Akamai Technologies has invested in building a strong brand portfolio. The SWOT analysis of Akamai Technologies just underlines this fact. This brand portfolio can be extremely useful if the organization wants to expand into new product categories.
Automation of activities brought consistency of quality to Akamai Technologies products and has enabled the company to scale up and scale down based on the demand conditions in the market.
Highly skilled workforce through successful training and learning programs. Akamai Technologies is investing huge resources in training and development of its employees resulting in a workforce that is not only highly skilled but also motivated to achieve more.
Superb Performance in New Markets – Akamai Technologies has built expertise at entering new markets and making success of them. The expansion has helped the organization to build new revenue stream and diversify the economic cycle risk in the markets it operates in.
Good Returns on Capital Expenditure – Akamai Technologies is relatively successful at execution of new projects and generated good returns on capital expenditure by building new revenue streams.
Strong dealer community – It has built a culture among distributor & dealers where the dealers not only promote company’s products but also invest in training the sales team to explain to the customer how he/she can extract the maximum benefits out of the products.
Successful track record of integrating complimentary firms through mergers & acquisition. It has successfully integrated number of technology companies in the past few years to streamline its operations and to build a reliable supply chain.

Weaknesses in CDN

If your CDN uses a data center that is associated with frequent suspicious behavior, your IP address may be deemed suspicious, even if you’ve done nothing wrong. Sites like Facebook, Amazon, and many email servers use IP blacklists to protect their users from possible cyberattack or fraud. Having a bad IP or domain reputation can cause your website, emails, and any associated online assets to be blocked entirely by some services.
Further, a CDN using unpatched or outdated systems is vulnerable to attack, making your website and online assets vulnerable too.

Weaknesses in Akamai

SWOT analysis

High attrition rate in work force – compare to other organizations in the industry Akamai Technologies has a higher attrition rate and have to spend a lot more compare to its competitors on training and development of its employees.
Not highly successful at integrating firms with different work culture. As mentioned earlier even though Akamai Technologies is successful at integrating small companies it has its share of failure to merge firms that have different work culture.
The company has not being able to tackle the challenges present by the new entrants in the segment and has lost small market share in the niche categories. Akamai Technologies has to build internal feedback mechanism directly from sales team on ground to counter these challenges.
Financial planning is not done properly and efficiently. The current asset ratio and liquid asset ratios suggest that the company can use the cash more efficiently than what it is doing at present.
Organization structure is only compatible with present business model thus limiting expansion in adjacent product segments.
The marketing of the products left a lot to be desired. Even though the product is a success in terms of sale but its positioning and unique selling proposition is not clearly defined which can lead to the attacks in this segment from the competitors.
Need more investment in new technologies. Given the scale of expansion and different geographies the company is planning to expand into, Akamai Technologies needs to put more money in technology to integrate the processes across the board. Right now the investment in technologies is not at par with the vision of the company.

Comparison

Akamai is one of the largest if not the largest provider of CDN technology today, and is used by:

All top 10 video streaming services
All top 10 video game companies
All top 10 banks
All top 10 software companies

Money

Compared to other companies of Akamai, Akamai doesnt really make difference on the customer as its billing plan is scalable by usage, while other companies have different plans to choose from that are more future friendly for the customer. Akamai has also a minimum 12 month plan that others doesnt have.

Location Coverage

Akamai has deployed the most pervasive, highly distributed content delivery network (CDN) with approximately 350,000 servers in 134 countries and over 1,300 networks around the world.

Security As for the major companies, in security they provide both different but the same technology, in protecting you against DoS and DDoS attacks, and web attacks such as SQL injection.

Summary

To summarise I would say that Akamai is the biggest CDN provider at the moment, but is more suited for major companies rather than small businesses. They work to keep sites safe and easy to reach and use, for both the owner of the site and the user.

For a web developer, CDN or Akamai is very relevant, as CDN will help:

Decrease server load
Improve site speed and website performance
Allow audience segmentation based on user analytics
Reduce packet loss and lower network latency
Enable advanced website security
Enhance content availability
Contribute to cost savings by reducing bandwidth
Increase audience reach and scale effectively

Credits

Thomas Henriksen (Snurre1)

References

https://www.akamai.com/

http://fernfortuniversity.com/term-papers/swot/1433/919-akamai-technologies.php

https://techdocs.akamai.com/gtm/docs/welcome-to-global-traffic-management

https://www.cdnetworks.com/web-performance-blog/cdn-benefits/

https://www.grfcpa.com/2021/08/content-delivery-network-cdn-security-risks/