Akamai to launch scrubbing centres in Mumbai and Chennai

American content delivery network (CDN), cloud and cybersecurity firm Akamai Technologies said on Thursday, it is launching two scrubbing centres in India, in Mumbai and Chennai, as part of its global investment strategy.  

The facilities will provide on-ground support to Akamai’s India customers to help them defend against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and accelerate their adoption of cloud. A DDoS attack occurs when a threat actor uses resources from multiple, remote locations to attack an organisation's online operations. 

The scrubbing centres, according to the company, will help protect computer networks from cyber-attacks by acting as a buffer between them and the internet to filter harmful traffic, such as DDoS attacks, and will also support Akamai’s global security ecosystem. In February this year, the company established a scrubbing centre in Aukland, New Zealand. 

The number of cyber-attacks in India has recorded a steady growth over the past few years, and the total number as reported to and tracked by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in the current year stands at 12,67,564 (till November), with the country seeing a 256% increase of attacks from the pre-pandemic times in 2019. 

Sid Pisharoti, regional vice president for Akamai India Operations, told Tech Circle that the global pandemic has hastened the shift to remote work, online transactions, and digitalisation, opening up new avenues for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities and conduct attacks. Increased use of online platforms and weak infrastructure were also the top factors contributing to the cause. 

Pisharoti added that the launch of the new scrubbing centres and Akamai’s DDoS protection platform dubbed Prolexic will safeguard businesses, especially those in high-risk sectors such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), healthcare, public sector, large enterprises, SMBs, gaming and e-commerce further improving attack mitigation response time and performance. 

A report by cyber security firm CloudSEK published on February 8 showed that India was the highest attacked country by hackers in Asia and the second-most attacked country globally (after the US) in 2022. It added that the number of cyber-attacks on India increased by 24.3% last year.  

At present Akamai has 2,000 security professionals operating in India. Pisharoti said the scrubbing centres are “our commitment towards safeguarding our customer’s data and solidifying our presence in the Indian market”. 

Explaining the relevance of setting up the facilities in India, Pisharoti said that the country’s economy has been experiencing significant growth in recent years with the emergence of new startups and established multinational companies alike, but the vibrant business scene also increases the surface for cyberattacks, which means that a local focus is essential.  

As cyber threats evolve, and more customers seek “always on” DDoS protection, having an in-region scrubbing centre is crucial for minimising latency and delivering exceptional end-user experiences. Akamai scrubbing centres use Anycast-based routing that enables mitigation of DDoS attacks close to their point of origin, helping companies keep data within their borders. 

Notably, Akamai’s competitor American cloud-services provider, Cloudflare, runs one of the world’s largest CDNs, which is used by companies like India’s largest brokerage firm Zerodha, payment services provider BharatPe, among others, also believes that the end objective is to reach a stage where service providers are closer to the place where the data is being processed. The company which operates in over 100 countries, has 23 data centres in India itself, and each facility already offers edge facilities.  In an interview with Mint published on August 2022 Jonathon Dixon, managing director for Asia-Pacific, Japan and China said that “as a massive number of businesses come online in India it will be crucial for service providers to be closer to the source of the demand for all this data”. 

Akamai, which currently operates across 134 countries (as per their website), also launched the Akamai Connected Cloud in February this year, a distributed edge and cloud platform. The platform will enable companies to build workloads that require single-digit millisecond latency and global reach. It also announced Akamai Qualified Computing Partner Program and is looking at building around six compute centres in India, which the company said "would put them on a footing with the best of the hyperscalers".