It looks like the engineering folk at Akamai have been hard at work in their chemistry lab cooking up some new features for its clientele. Their latest invention is called the Bot Manager. It seems like Akamai has been paying attention to the latest trends, and the latest trend says “go deep and go wide into the pure-play security feature-set”, thus putting you into a head-on collision with Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, and Cisco.  Lets recap what Akamai has been up to in regards to security over the last few years.

• Introduced Kona Site Protector (WAF)
• Acquired Prolexic
• Acquired Bloxx
• Introduced Bot Manager

Bot Manager Features

• Akamai Categorized Bots – constant update to its bot database
• Customer Categorized Bots – clients can create custom bot signatures
• Detection of Unknown Bots – detect unknown bots with some hocus pocus techie stuff
• Business Oriented Policies – segregate bots into types, and create policies to zap them away
• Advanced Management Actions – Apply specific actions to bots like block, delay, etc.
• Analysis and Reporting – lots of cool visuals of bot activity