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Akamai: “Strong traffic acceleration, piracy attacks a problem”

October 26, 2017

By Chris Forrester

Akamai Technologies unveiled its Q3 numbers this week, with co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton telling analysts that there was “strong traffic acceleration” in its Media business ($273 million (€231m) in the quarter-year). “Revenue in Q3 was $621 million, above the high-end of our guidance range and up 6 per cent over Q3 of last year,” said Leighton.

Leighton said Akamai’s new capabilities could surpass satellite in terms of delivery speeds. “The idea that now we can do live and linear broadcast ahead of satellite, that’s a pretty big change over what is otherwise available with OTT streaming typically being 10 seconds to 90 seconds behind the satellite broadcast.”

However, Leighton also warned that there were ever-increasing pressures from ‘Determined Denials of Service’ (DDoS) from deliberate attacks on security. “Account hacking is becoming a huge problem. In a recent study, we found that about two-thirds of the login attempts that we monitored across our customer base came from bots that were trying to break into accounts. And these bots are becoming more sophisticated at evading traditional defenses based on things like the number of login attempts that come from the same IP address.”

Leighton was praising Akamai’s Kona Site Defender and ‘Bot Manager Premier’ protection devices amongst other protection services. “Although Bot Manager Premier has only been in the market for a short while, we already have over 70 customers who are using it to help reduce the billions of dollars that we believe are lost to credential abuse annually,” he added.

“Year-over-year traffic growth on the Akamai platform accelerated in Q3 to the highest levels that we’ve seen in two years. In fact, Akamai’s traffic grew faster than the 24 per cent year-over-year growth rate that Cisco estimates for the Internet overall; and our video traffic grew at nearly double that rate. Just last month, we supported a single media event that drove more than 17 terabits a second in traffic. And on that day, we delivered 60 terabits per second overall on the Akamai platform, establishing a new record for our business.”

“It’s not hard to imagine audiences that are 10 or even 100 times as large in the future and viewing media at even higher bit rates. This is a key reason why we’re so optimistic about the future of our Media business and why we continue to focus on improving the scale, quality, and affordability of our over-the-top Media Delivery services,” added Leighton.

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