Tom Leighton (Akamai)
Nasdaq-listed Akamai Technologies is building a scrubbing centre and cloud data centre in Auckland as part of its global investment strategy.
The facilities will provide on-ground support to Akamai’s New Zealand customers to help them defend against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and accelerate their adoption of cloud.
The scrubbing centre 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.
Dr Tom Leighton, co-founder and CEO of Akamai Technologies, said New Zealand would play a critical role in adding to Akamai's capacity to defend clients and organisations from cyber-attacks.
"DDoS attacks have been escalating globally in recent years, while New Zealand's critical infrastructure has witnessed multiple campaigns against it particularly over the past two years," Leighton said.
US-based Akamai established a local subsidiary in mid-2022 via a Netherlands-based subsidiary.
The Akamai Prolexic scrubbing centre will defend our global and New Zealand customers from the largest, multi-terabit attacks.
"Akamai is committed to building scrubbing centres that enhance our global presence and solidify our attack mitigation posture,” Leighton said.
Having a presence in New Zealand and being close to observed activity would allow Akamai to provide the best 24/7 defence to customers, he said.
The Auckland scrubbing centre will also feature a new, software defined Prolexic architecture that minimised dependency on third party hardware and enabled faster installation and rollout while continuing to support Routed 3.0 zoning.
Akamai will also be setting up an enterprise-scale core cloud computing site in Auckland which would further support and solidify local cloud infrastructure.
This investment is part of Akamai’s newly launched Connected Cloud program, which will see the addition of four new enterprise-scale core cloud computing sites, including Auckland, in the Asia Pacific and Japan region.
The new sites will plug into Akamai's backbone and connect them to what Akamai said was the most distributed edge network on the planet.
The new sites will contain cloud computing services acquired from Linode and will become the template for additional core sites that Akamai plans to roll out globally.
"New Zealand is a mature cloud market, and Akamai has many valued customers here, Leighton said.
"The centre is key to our goal of bringing basic cloud computing capabilities into difficult-to reach-locations currently underserved by traditional cloud providers."
A DDoS attack on Waikato Hospital in 2021, part of a global plague, spurred cyber security investment across the health sector
