President Akamai foresaw "The key to future security lies in the" edge ""

In this series, "Isao Matsuoka's" This Week's Statement "", every week, key persons in the ICT industry pick up some of the words that they have stated at press conferences and events, and explain their meanings and background.

This time, we would like to introduce the remarks of Mr. Osamu Yamano, President of Akamai Technologies, and Mr. Ryuichi Ando, ​​President of Nice Japan.

"Traditional networks and security models are out of date" (Akamai Technologies President and CEO Osamu Yamano)

Osamu Yamano, President of Akamai Technologies

Akamai Technologies recently held a private event "Akamai Security Summit Japan" online. Mr. Yamano's opening remarks in his greetings and speeches as the organizer of the event described future changes in networks and security models.

First, Mr. Yamano quoted Gartner's message and said:

"With digital transformation and the introduction of mobile, cloud, and edge deployment models, network traffic patterns are fundamentally changing, and existing network and security models will become obsolete."

In this message, he emphasized that the last phrase, "existing networks and security models are obsolete," is particularly noteworthy. "We've been implementing application-related performance and security stacks on our internal servers and data centers for many years, and now they're all moving to the cloud through digital transformation," he said. rice field.

So is the cloud the solution to those changes? Mr. Yamano denies that "the cloud is not all the solution", and there are three reasons: "users access from everywhere", "threats are everywhere", and "applications are everywhere". Was mentioned.

"The big question arises in these three phenomena, is it possible to duplicate and implement a performance and security stack for applications in different locations?" The answer is clearly no. " Then what should I do?

"If you can't replicate the performance and security stack in the cloud to a number of applications, you have to backhaul the traffic. But backhauling the traffic slows performance and costs money, so if possible. That's something I want to avoid "(Fig. 1)

Figure 1: Backhauling traffic slows performance (Source: Akamai Security Summit Japan)

The keyword that Mr. Yamano mentioned as a solution is "edge".

"Our idea is to move the performance and security stack to the edge, which is distributed near users, applications, and threats, rather than backhauling traffic" (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The solution is Edge (Source: Akamai Security Summit Japan)

Akamai has configured the world's largest edge platform by distributing and interconnecting more than 340,000 servers in 135 countries around the world, and this mechanism can be utilized. Will it be as expected by Mr. Yamano? I would like to keep an eye on future trends only for very important issues.