Akamai Bulks Up Network Platform

Akamai Technologies Inc. made available Monday its enhanced infrastructure service platform, which includes features that improve business continuity in case of disaster or denial of service attacks.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have underscored the need for business continuity and back-up services.

As enterprises move more business processes online, downtime risks caused by physical disasters, distributed denial of service attacks, viruses, and unpredictable flash crowds become more critical, Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai said.

Its flagship EdgeSuite platform off-loads an enterprise's Web presence onto Akamai's global network. The distributed nature of the network acts as a shock absorber to preserve a company's infrastructure and availability so a site has no central point of failure, said Michael Ruffolo, Akamai vice president of global sales and marketing.

The network provider has added a site shield to protect the origin server from the public Internet. In case of a site failure, Akamai's platform will be able to serve the most recently cached content, a single default page, or an entire backup version of the site that is stored on the network.

Other features are a distributed network of DNS servers to handle queries quickly and without fail in the event of unplanned downtime due to server failure, network congestion and outages and an option that provides highly secure and reliable delivery of all SSL content, including transactions.

Amtrak enlisted Akamai to off-load record Web traffic in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks as travelers had to switch to ground transportation.