The next battle in the CDN industry is taking place now. The cloud security industry and CDN market are collapsing. Akamai and Imperva are at the forefront of this change. The era of the next generation firewall appliance is becoming a technology of the past; being slowly replaced by cloud based security services.
A handful of CDNs and pure-play security companies understand the change that is occurring in the marketplace. They are adjusting their business models to embrace the change. Akamai has acquired Prolexic, and Imperva acquired Incapsula. Akamai strictly offers cloud security, and Imperva provides both onsite products and cloud security, through Incapsula.
Next Generation Firewall vs CDN Cloud Security
The cloud security service is far and above the better solution. By the time the cyber attack hits the customer location, it’s too late, and too costly. It’s better to stop the attack in its tracks, near the source, where it originated. A CDN is equipped to provide better protection than all hardware based appliances. The CDN POP architecture is a natural fit for cloud security; where POP’s are spread across several countries at the major Internet Exchanges. In a few years, cloud security services is going to take up a bigger piece of the security budget.
CDN companies need to grasp this trend today, and take appropriate action. Or else the cloud security companies like Zscaler are going to come in and take market share away from the CDNs. The current CDN feature set of token authentication, SSL, WAF, and so on, are not going to provide the solid protection they once did, against the highly skilled cyber criminal. If Limelight were to take the lead on cloud security, everyone in the CDN ecosystem would follow suit. For Limelight is the representative for the CDN Startup ecosystem.