Akamai expanded its long-running Prolexic distributed denial of service (DDoS) platform with a cloud-based offer that gives customers more direct control over knobs and switches. The move continues the vendor’s push toward greater cloud support and availability for its security products.

Craig Sparling, senior product manager at Akamai, explained to SDxCentral that the new Prolexic Network Cloud Firewall allows customers to define and manage their own access control lists to better fine tune network edge deployments.

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Customers can use the new cloud interface to define proactive defense strategies to block malicious traffic and reduce pressure on local infrastructure by moving rules to their edge deployments. This control can be run across the full Prolexic footprint.

“This is probably the most No.1 requested feature from our customer base of large enterprise customers that have been using Prolexic for years,” Sparling said of the launch. “They always wanted the ability to extend what they do with the Prolexic edge beyond just block by DDoS attacks. We’re already in this traffic path for them so why not knock out other annoying ports and protocols or malicious IP spaces.”

Sparling added that Akamai had traditionally only done this sort of work if it was actively part of a DDoS attack.

Prolexic is Akamai’s cloud-based DDoS protection platform designed to stop attacks before they reach applications, data centers and internet-facing infrastructure. The vendor late last year rolled out the sixth iteration of the Prolexic platform. Gartner last year crowned Akamai, Cloudflare and Imperva as “leaders” of the cloud web application and API protection (WAAP) market, which include DDoS protection as one of that segment’s core functionalities.

The expansion puts Akamai into a new relationship with its Prolexic customers.

“We're actually allowing the customers to choose how they use our platform, which is kind of a big leap of faith for us,” Sparling said. “Do you want to go block 400 IPs that showed up on a naughty list that you purchased off the internet? Go ahead and pop it into our Network Cloud Firewall.”

Sparling did add that while this level of customization has been heavily requested, Akamai figures it will most likely be used by those larger customers.

“At least for within the Prolexic space, we've always had our sweet spot in the global enterprise. That's where we can name drop with anyone,” Sparling said. “Some of them do have a dedicated [network operating center] or [security operating center] and this level of competence and I actually think that this is going to serve them really well because they've got the capacities to do this. But it's also going to serve a little bit down market in the sense that they are already doing this but don't necessarily have all the tooling to update their systems and to see what's going on in their network. By allowing this be centralized that also leads to simplification on some level. So we think this will go a little bit down market, but we're not really targeting this at the [small to mid-sized business] scene.”

Akamai expands DDoS protection

What this does target is bolstering Akamai’s customer stance against the increasingly problematic DDoS threat landscape.

Akamai last year reported that layer-seven DDoS attacks have increased despite those attacks being more expensive and difficult to execute.

“DDoS extortion, application assaults and targeted attacks against internet-facing infrastructure continue to pose a threat to organizations across all industries globally,” the Akamai security research team wrote in a blog post. “The targets of DDoS attackers are specifically chosen and executed against,” the team wrote. “This isn’t to say compensation isn’t a factor. It simply isn’t the primary motivation. These attacks are more personal; sometimes, they’re even politically motivated.”

Netscout more recently noted in a report that it saw peak DDoS alert traffic hit a staggering high of 436 petabits in a single day, with a significant surge coming from so-called “carpet-bombing” DDoS attacks. A carpet-bombing DDoS is one where adversaries go after entire IP address ranges on internet service provider (ISP) networks.

Akamai continues its cloud push

Akamai earlier this year rolled out its new Connected Cloud platform that integrates the vendor’s cloud, security, and content delivery network (CDN) capabilities targeting service holes from hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The product involves Akamai constructing 13 new core cloud computing sites across the globe that will join its 11 existing core sites.

Shawn Michels, VP of product management at Akamai, explained during a press briefing about that launch that the core sites are designed to meet the “performance and localization needs of our customers.” He added they were akin to AWS or GCP regions “where you have very highly scalable data centers and regions, with very broad computing capabilities, and with very dense compute resource capabilities.”

The new sites will include all of the cloud computing services Akamai acquired as part of its $900 million Linode purchase last year.