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.
We have been using Infoblox DDI for 10+ years at Pitney Bowes. The experience has improved gradually. As far as DNS and DHCP go, they are amongst the top ones offering this service. The support is great and downtime is minimal. The IPAM is always scanning the network to update the IP database. The caching servers reduce the lookups towards the internet. All in all, this is a must-have in every data center.
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.
Reporting is an add-on feature, which requires another system. The basics are free.
Network systems management and reporting is another add-on. However, this is significantly expensive.
The pricing structure is somewhat ridiculous. It's the least expensive system for a duel site. It has 10s of thousands (for a full feature IP tool), but in our case is crazy expensive.
It's generally easy to navigate through all of the menus. It's also very powerful in that there are many options available for configuration, allowing one to take advantage of IP address management tools. This tool is definitely a leader in the space, and provided you have the budget, is a very good investment. The team that uses it will appreciate the tool.
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.
Between Solarwinds IPAM and Infoblox, I'd still choose Infoblox even if Solarwinds is prettier to look at. Infoblox does a fantastic job at managing IP space and really doesn't have much competition in this space. Ease of use, being able to queue changes and having all this done via a web interface that just works is very convenient.
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.
