Akamai Accelerates Cloud and Mobile Solutions

Akamai Technologies added two new solutions to its portfolio of solutions to meet demands and challenges faced by enterprise cloud and mobile acceleration. The new products, Terra Alta and Aqua Mobile Accelerator, expand on the company's Kona, Sola and Aura solutions.

Citing growth trends driving business in a hyperconnected world, Akamai notes Gartner projections that the cloud services market will grow more than 3 times by 2015 to $177 billion, while Cisco predicts that more than 90 percent of Internet traffic will be video in 2 years.

Terra Alta

The Akamai Terra product is an enterprise-class solution designed to address the evolving complexities of application acceleration in the cloud. Terra is designed for the mobile workforce, and helps accelerate complex applications that rely on multiple components. It can also be deployed within an enterprise network architecture. In February Akamai and Riverbed partnered to deliver a new product, the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, which combines the Akamai Platform with Riverbed's Steelhead WAN optimization technology.

Features of the Terra Alta solution include Enterprise Edge, a virtual machine running Akamai optimization technology, Edge Load Balancing to globally load balance application traffic, and Enterprise DNS Mapping to dynamically adapt to user location and remove dependencies on enterprise DNS.

"Companies want to use the cloud as an enterprise application delivery environment because it’s the most effective and efficient way to reach the broadest set of users," said Willie Tejada, Senior Vice President and GM of the Enterprise Cloud Division at Akamai. "Unfortunately, controlling the cloud can seriously erode the promises and expectations of cloud computing. With the release of Terra Alta, we're giving our customers powerful solutions specifically designed to provide the best possible performance for their entire portfolio of cloud delivered business applications."

Aqua Mobile Accelerator

Aqua was introduced as a new service designed to help online businesses provide an improved user experience for mobile web sites and applications. It brings together a variety of performance enhancements designed to deliver content to mobile devices across environments plagued by unpredictable network conditions, latency and packet loss. Aqua contains features of two of Akamai's recent acquisitions, with Cotendo late last year and Blaze in February 2012. Features in Aqua include Akamai Mobile Protocol, which uses real-time connection sensing to apply the best optimization, and Mobile Detection and Redirect to quickly differentiate desktop browser from mobile browser requests.

"Businesses must expect that their customers, employees, and partners will want to access web sites and applications from anywhere, at anytime, from any device," said Lydia Leong, research vice president, Gartner. "Mobile devices, which have limited computing power and are connected to networks that often have high and unpredictable latencies, present a particular challenge, driving increasing market interest in optimization technologies, whether applied to mobile content and applications, or mobile networks."

Kona and Sola

Akamai Kona Site Defender was announced last month at the RSA Conference as a solution to help online businesses mitigate the risk of web attacks.  Kona combines all of the Akamai security products. At the 2012 Mobile World Congres Akamai announced its involvement with the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem and demonstrated the delivery of UltraViolet.  Sola is Akamai's set of capabilities around UltraViolet Entertainment distribution and has been tested with some of its customers.  Aura network solutions include MCDN for managed CDN services and licensed CDN capabilities.