July 2018 Archives

The underlying protocols of the Internet continue to evolve, and massive events such as the World Cup are a great opportunity to see this in action.  A single-match peak for live video streaming of 22.5 Tbps was set on Akamai on Tuesday July 10 during the semi-final in Russia between France and Belgium.  Akamai helps deliver World Cup coverage for a large number of broadcasters and subscription-based streaming services, meaning that we have a diverse set of customer configurations and end-user populations.  Across these customers, we're seeing an increasing use of technologies such as HTTPS (delivering streaming segments over the encrypted-and-authenticated TLS) as well as enabling content for delivery over IPv6 as well as legacy IPv4 ("dual-stacking").

Akamai employees in Cambridge have started to see some new faces around the office for the summer - 20+ high school juniors to be specific!

For the fourth consecutive year, Akamai is partnering with Girls Who Code to host a seven-week long summer immersion program dedicated to closing the gender gap in tech. The girls will learn the basics of programming, robotics, data analysis and visualization by attending classes and workshops, going on field trips, and meeting with female Akamai employees as mentors.

We kicked off the program on Monday evening with a meet and greet to welcome both the girls and their parents to the Akamai family. We heard from Akamai CEO Dr. Tom Leighton who reiterated Akamai's commitment to encouraging more girls and women to explore careers in tech. Mallory Grider, an Akamai intern and former teaching assistant with Girls Who Code, also left us with an inspiring closing statement by reminding the girls that despite how male-dominated the tech industry is, each and every one of the them has a right to pursue a career in computer science.

Akamai Technologies set a new record on Thursday, July 12th, 2018, for the peak level of traffic delivered for a single video game on its network, at more than 37 Tbps peak across all platforms. This massive influx of traffic was driven by the launch of Epic Games' cultural phenomenon: Fortnite, which launched its Season 5 on Thursday. To put this into perspective, this level of traffic would be like downloading the average mobile game 2.8 million times per minute. This demonstrates both the continued success of Epic Games' hit title, and the power and resiliency of the Akamai Intelligent Platform.

Nelson Rodriguez is Global Director, Media Industry Strategy at Akamai.

Complexity kills productivity. When it comes to enabling application access, enterprises should not have to choose between user experience and complex techniques that ensure application security. Traditionally, perimeter security is built on an assumption that whatever is inside the perimeter is trusted and users can access any corporate application through traditional authentication approaches. That's a big assumption that has become outdated based on the amount of recent attacks and data breach post mortems. The old model of perimeter security has lost its relevance. We are moving from a "trust, but verify" mantra to a "never trust, always verify" one.