Expanding services in cybersecurity, Cloud computing, says Akamai exec

Data sovereignty and technology costs 'extremely critical' issues for Indian companies, says Mitesh Jain

Akamai Technologies is expanding services in cybersecurity and Cloud computing to help customers deliver personalised content to their users sooner, said Mitesh Jain, the company’s regional vice-president.

 

The company aims to differentiate itself by building and providing distributed Cloud where data storage and security will be combined and kept closer to users.

 

Indian ecommerce, gaming and fintech companies are increasingly opting for this distributed structure of Cloud instead of a centralised offering of “hyper-scalers”, said Jain. A distributed Cloud computing structure is more useful in India where low latency — the time it takes for data packets to be stored or retrieved — is an issue.

 

“In a country like India, low latency, data sovereignty, and above all cost efficiencies are extremely critical. We now have about 850 million internet users and the expectation for low latency and ‘always on’ performance is high,” Jain said.

 

Akamai acquired Linode in 2022 to strengthen its distributed Cloud and Edge computing services. The acquisition has helped Akamai to offer Cloud and Zero Trust Architecture, a cybersecurity model, services to customers at much better prices, he said.

 

According to Akamai’s State of the Internet security report, web applications and application programming interfaces comprise more than 50 per cent of all cyberattacks globally. In India, there has been a 37 per cent year-on-year increase in distributed denial of service attacks, primarily on banking, financial services, over-the-top platforms, ecommerce companies and other sectors.

 

“What is really interesting is that now in the current scheme of things, how AI (artificial intelligence) is influencing both sides of the equation. While on one hand, attackers are using AI to automate and evolve much faster, we are also now looking into building AI into defences,” said Jain.

 

Akamai is building new services that will protect customers’ AI models from emerging threats such as prompt injections, model extractions and adversarial inputs.