Akamai expansion to tap govt push

To take data servers to 200 cities by '16

Content delivery network (CDN) services provider Akamai Technologies has expressed its readiness to expand its data server facilities to more cities to cater to the demands of government and private enterprises.

In an interaction with Deccan Herald, Akamai Technologies India Managing Director and Vice President Sidharth Malik said, “We have been witnessing growing demand for server management as the government is increasing its citizen-centric initiatives. As part of the digital India campaign, we are witnessing a host of opportunities for hardware and solution providers. We are present in around 100 cities and will make it around 200 by the end of next year,” he said.

According to Akamai’s first quarter ‘State of the Internet’ report, India continues to lag behind in broadband adoption as it has a 4.9 per cent adoption, which places it at 85th in overall rankings. “Further, India’s average connection speed was 1.7 Mbps in Q1, 2014, placing India in the lowest rank in the Asia-Pacific region,” states the report.

Malik also said the country is witnessing a 26 per cent increase in attack traffic, placing it among the top 10 countries facing traffic attack globally. “Today, Akamai is focused on making the internet fast, reliable, and secure. Our cloud optimisation platform consists of over 170,000 servers in 102 countries, and handles 15 to 30 per cent of Web traffic,” he said.

When asked about improving video quality, he said Akamai addresses this challenge by providing customers with the ability to have an end-to-end cloud-based media workflow capability.  

“We can dynamically adapt video streams according to the location of the request and adjusting between high and low quality, depending on network bandwidth, irrespective of platform or device,” said Malik.

The company also utilises optimisation technologies like FastTCP protocol, SureRoute, Advanced Cache Optimization and others, to dramatically improve performance.

“We find that locating the security operations centre (SOC) resource close to the point of attack origin helps in tackling it in a better way,” said  Malik.

It recently announced the opening of a new SOC in Bangalore. “This latest expansion enhances Akamai’s ‘follow the sun’ strategy for customer service and support. Now we have even more security professionals available to help mitigate attacks and keep customer sites and applications available and performing optimally,” he said.