It has been a whirlwind year for content delivery network players like Akamai and Cloudflare. While Akamai has seen a downturn in their CDN business, they have catapulted their play in the cyber security aspect.In an interaction with ETtech’s Aritra Sarkhel, Rick McConnell, President and General Manager, Web Division, Akamai Technologies talks about their security play, why net neutrality should not apply to CDN players, how they re-skill people and accelerating mobile load time.
Edited Excerpts
Why has your share prices dwindled down in the last two months?
Our investors have concern over pricing pressure on our largest accounts. Large internet platform companies have loads of money to spend on CDNs which has put pressure on the overall growth. But our media growth rates continue in the low double digits for the balance of the business. You have pressure coming from around 6 accounts but rest of the business is healthy.
Does your work in the data security sector balance the softness in the media market?
The security business is growing 40% year on year. It’s near $100m a quarter. This business 5 years ago was non-existent but has moved from zero to half a billion dollars. We have the largest distributed platform on the planet in terms of a CDN to manage these attacks. Our platform at peak utilization clocks 45 terabytes per second. We have multiple security operation centers across the world which analyze data to evaluate attack threats. We anticipate attacks and then send updates which can manage the attacks effectively.
Load time for mobile sites is worse in India. Isn’t accelerating content for mobile content an issue for Akamai?
Accelerating content for mobile is a headache for CDN providers. We are investing large amounts for mobile. We have two hundred thousand servers that are highly distributed across 120 countries in more than 3000 regions which enable delivery from the edge but what we can’t control is that last mile.
So if there is a huge amount of congestion in the cell tower, mobile page load speeds slow down. We increasingly integrate our technology in mobile apps to allow the developer to anticipate the needs of the application so the content can essentially be downloaded.
We do real-time assessment device bandwidth, so when we notice bandwidth reduction; we push the right quality image rather than shipping a large size image.
Should Net Neutrality rules apply for CDN players?
We believe Net Neutrality should not apply to CDNs. Our objective is to enable the internet to work properly. Without CDNs, the overall requirements of the internet would expand exponentially.
Think about the amount of content we offload from service providers who otherwise would have been forced to deliver massive amounts of content from the core of their infrastructure. If you regulated that, you will lose that capability. The overall internet pressures will be dramatic. We believe India should exclude CDN from Net Neutrality.
What’s your play with the Indian government?
We are working very closely on the security aspect of the Indian government. We are also working with education bodies associated with the government of India who is going to provide video-based training. We are work very closely with NIC and PMO office to ensure cyber security to the government’s digital assets.
How do you manage to hire skilled people in the security paradigm?
We recruit people from geographies that have strong security people. Israel is a great example followed by Silicon Valley or Bangalore. Also, we hire certain people from university whom we find may not have the expertise in cyber warfare but have a strong interest in security. Thirdly is by acquisition; we recently acquired Cyberfend who had talented professionals in bot management.
