Akamai Technologies has announced that it is building a Scrubbing Centre and Cloud Data Centre in Auckland, New Zealand as part of its global infrastructure investment strategy. This is aimed at providing on-ground support to Akamai’s New Zealand users to help defend against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and help accelerate their cloud journey.
Helping organisations combat sophisticated DDoS attacks
Cyber-attacks have continued to build in New Zealand since 2020, with both businesses and government departments affected. According to the New Zealand Government’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), 2,069 cyber security incidents were responded to by CERT NZ in Q3 2022, up 3% from Q2 2022, with 30% of incidents reporting a financial loss, resulting in NZ $8.9 million in direct financial loss.
This is in line with global trends which have seen DDoS attacks sharply increasing since the pandemic, forcing security teams to deal with a much wider range of highly sophisticated attacks. Akamai research has found a 22% uptick in volume of DDoS attacks targeting the financial services industry in 2022.
Akamai’s scrubbing centre in Auckland will help protect not only local computer networks from cyber-attacks by filtering network traffic to identify any harmful traffic, such as DDoS attacks, acting as a buffer between the internet and the network, but also support Akamai’s wider global security ecosystem.
According to Dr Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and CEO of Akamai Technologies, New Zealand will play a critical role in adding to Akamai’s capacity to defend clients and organisations from cyber-attacks.
“DDoS attacks have been escalating globally in recent years, while New Zealand’s critical infrastructure has witnessed multiple campaigns against it particularly over the past two years. The Akamai Prolexic scrubbing centre will defend our global and New Zealand customers from the largest, multi-terabit attacks. Akamai is committed to building scrubbing centres that enhance our global presence and solidify our attack mitigation posture,” said Dr Leighton.
“With cyber-attacks on the rise in New Zealand, cybersecurity has become a key national priority. Having an on-site presence in the country will allow us to provide the best defence to our customers. Being close to where the activity is observed and anticipated and meeting the needs of our customers gives our customers an added assurance of having cyber protection 24/7. We are progressing towards a 2024 roadmap that offers 20+ Tbps of platform capacity, with over 95% being available for attack mitigation.”
The Auckland scrubbing centre will also feature new software defined Prolexic architecture that minimises dependency on third party hardware. This enables much faster installation and rollout and will also continue to support Routed 3.0 zoning.
A unique, new safety feature is segmentation to maximise the system availability and minimise the blast radius of any platform failure, with every customer served by a different subset of servers which will offer increase in dedicated mitigation capacity.
Accelerating New Zealand businesses’ cloud journey
In addition, Akamai will also be setting up an enterprise-scale core cloud computing site in Auckland which will further support and solidify the local cloud infrastructure.
This move is part of Akamai’s newly launched Connected Cloud program which will see the addition of four new enterprise-scale core cloud computing sites in the Asia Pacific and Japan region, with Auckland being one of the sites. The new regional sites will plug into the Akamai backbone — connecting them to the most distributed edge network on the planet. The new sites will contain cloud computing services acquired from Linode and will become the template for additional core sites that Akamai plans to roll out across the globe.
“New Zealand is a mature cloud market, and Akamai has many valued customers here. The Auckland cloud data centre will further support and enhance our New Zealand customers’ cloud journey and help accelerate their cloud needs. The centre is key to our goal of bringing basic cloud computing capabilities into difficult-to reach-locations currently underserved by traditional cloud providers,” said Dr Leighton.
