Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Boston, offers a Akamai: a content delivery network (CDN).
N/A
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
IBM Cloud Internet Services is a set of edge network services for securing internet-facing applications from DDoS attacks, data theft, and bot attacks, as well as optimizing their web apps or ensuring global responsiveness and the ongoing availability of their internet-facing applications.
Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.
In terms of business challenges, it simplifies the job of my engineers and significantly increases the productivity of my teams when they collaborate with IBM teams all over the world. Now that we have completed a proof-of-concept using the services supplied by IBM, we expect it to assist us in managing them more efficiently; thus far, management has been straightforward.
Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible.
Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers.
Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly.
The interface in their control centre could be a bit more user-friendly with some of the settings in places that you wouldn't expect them to be. The search offsets this problem to an extent but it's still sometimes slower than you'd like to find what you are looking for.
Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.
We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more likely to suggest CloudFlare (which has a free tier) or an integrated offering from a cloud provider, like Cloudfront.
I have used Salesforce to explore it as an app but I have found them both able to solve my needs and requirements when it comes to security. While I choose IBM Cloud Internet Services for more accessibility, a better price was available with Saleforce. Although that is just my observation.
Akamai RoI improved over a period of times since it comes with heavy costs, however global deliveries in over 100 counties and global web platforms usage helps improve RoI
With the complex UI challenges, ROI could be impacted negatively when you have to invest in operations and time.
