Top Weekly Updates
1. Fastly Expands Operations Globally
In keeping pace with expanding content delivery traffic, CDN provider Fastly has recently announced an addition of two new Points of Presence (POPs) in Brisbane and Perth, Australia and one a new South American POP in São Paulo, Brazil. With additional access point reach, this will allow further support for real-time web, app, and API traffic to vastly increase for current customers and for those entering the market in these countries. Additionally, adding a POP in Brazil will support their growing internet population with high performing websites and just in time for high-traffic content events such as the 2016 Olympic Games.
Fastly has also recently opened an office in Denver due to easier access to market-reaching tech companies in the Midwest and Mountain States and venture-funded startups. With the company’s increasing availability of new locations, features, and capacity, Fastly now hits 1 Tb/second of bandwidth for their content delivery services, making them a viable fierce competitor.
2. Akamai Reports DDos Attacks Up 180% in Q3 2015
According to Akamai’s State of the Internet report, they have reported that the third quarter has shown DDos Attacks significantly increasing by 180%, with a reported 1,105 DDos attacks and a 23% increase quarter to quarter. The online gaming sector is now the biggest target during the quarter, accounting for 50% of all DDoS attacks. While on average the attacks are shown as smaller and shorter on average, the main culprit is the wide availability of DDos-for-Hire sites that can expose and abuse Internet services temporarily, knock down service, and hold gaming accounts for ransom until they receive payment or the security team removes the threat.
This should raise major concerns for the online gaming industry, since these ongoing attacks, despite being minimal, can become a constant threat for internet cloud security. This should be true especially for upcoming major high-traffic event that can be attacked at peak times, such as the World Cup, before a big horse-racing festival, or during a poker tournaments series that can risk losing tens of thousands of dollars per hour.
3. Google Begins Alpha Testing Cloud CDN
Google’s cloud content delivery response to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure will arrive very soon as they begin alpha testing on their own CDN today. Any customer who wishes to test out the service must Compute Engine HTTP(S) load balancing, or keeping the caches at the local end of the network as geographically close as possible in order to access the Cloud CDN.
Although they recently collaborated with Akamai for a direct connection between both cloud platforms, Google’s new CDN service will become their direct competitor in the near future. Google has also partnered with other CDN providers such as Fastly, CloudFlare, Highwinds, and Level 3 for more CDN delivery. This creates implications that the “competitive” cloud services will become a blurrier line. But since Google is only offering a very specific load balancing feature for customers for now, only time will tell when Google officially enters the CDN market.
4. UK’s Moonfruit Takes Down Websites, Christmas Sales Down
Moonfruit, a UK-based identikit company that lets customers build a website or an online shop out of a user-friendly template, has been temporarily taken offline for the next 12 hours in response to a recent DDos attack. Although the company claims this is for infrastructure maintenance, this affects thousands of online businesses, especially affecting potential loss of sales for the upcoming Christmas holidays on such a short notice right after the cybersecurity attack.
5. Apple TV Delay Hurts Akamai Stock
With Apple delaying Apple TV streaming services until 2016, JP Morgan reports that they will be reducing the Akamai’s earning estimates, as they are priced as Neutral at $65. Akamai is poised to become the key CDN provider in providing a large network infrastructure for Apple TV. Due to stalled negotiations with media companies such as CBS, Fox and NBC, owned by Comcast Corp to secure what channels can be included in Apple TV’s bundled content, this adversely affects Akamai’s financial health the longer the streaming service is postponed.