Companies Finding Business Continuity With Akamai

As Effects of Taiwan Earthquake Continue to Disrupt Internet Communications, Companies Find Business Continuity With Akamai

It has been over one month since an earthquake off Taiwan dramatically impacted Internet connectivity by severing undersea telecommunications cables, but businesses leveraging Akamai Technologies, Inc. for Web content and applications delivery into Asia continue to experience strong online performance and uptime of operations. For additional information on Akamai's services for ensuring availability of a business' online operations, please go to www.akamai.com/availability.

"The impact of the recent earthquake near Taiwan is a prime example of the often over-looked vulnerabilities with today's Internet infrastructure," said Tom Leighton, chief scientist at Akamai. "Akamai's global platform intelligently routes around bottlenecks on the Internet, finding the optimal path for content to always reach end users. As a result, we are enabling businesses to ensure availability in the wake of widespread events such as this recent earthquake, and during smaller-scale, but far more pervasive events that happen on a daily basis."

For example, during the initial week following the earthquake, tests* show that Web transactions handled by online businesses not leveraging Akamai were either unavailable, or took as long as 1-2 minutes to complete. Conversely, Web transactions delivered by Akamai peaked to an average of 4-5 seconds to complete immediately following the earthquake, before returning to pre-quake levels of an average of 2 seconds.

"The Manpower brand is intrinsically tied to the customer experience, which requires top performance and continual uptime for all of our clients as they leverage our employment services," said Joe Luedtke, Director Global Technology Services at Manpower. "In the days and weeks following the earthquake near Taiwan, Akamai was critical in enabling Manpower's online services to remain high performing for our users within Asia. Our Akamai-enabled systems experienced no disruption in service or performance."

In China specifically, where business' online operations have been hardest hit by the effects of the earthquake, Akamai customers have experienced near 100 percent availability for Web transactions delivered via the Akamai platform versus an average of 40 percent availability for transactions delivered from a company's origin infrastructure.*

Akamai operates in close partnership with nationally-licensed service providers in China to comply with local requirements. These partnerships allow customers of Akamai continue to receive consistent high performance from locations within and around China.

Akamai's Web Application Accelerator and Dynamic Site Accelerator services are designed to leverage Akamai's globally-deployed platform to deliver consistent, improved application performance for users worldwide. Akamai accelerates customers' dynamic Web transactions using a number of techniques, many of which are unique to Akamai. For example:

- Dynamic mapping of user requests to an optimal Akamai edge server allows Akamai to respond in real time to changing Internet conditions, alleviating the impact of network problems and improving availability of customer applications.
- Route optimization technology enables Akamai to avoid Internet problem spots, sending application transactions over Internet paths that are fast and reliable.
- Connection optimization technology incorporates a number of capabilities, including compression, long-lived inter-server connections, content pre-fetching, and transport protocol optimization.

"As enterprises move business processes online for cost and time efficiencies, the risks of downtime caused by planned and unplanned maintenance, physical disasters, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, viruses, and unpredictable flash crowds are many," continued Leighton. "The availability of an enterprise's Web operations is vital to building and maintaining its brand equity and customer loyalty, ensuring communications with customers and partners, and ultimately generating revenue. The inherent nature of Akamai's massively distributed global network provides a shock absorbing effect to protect a company's centralized infrastructure and preserve high availability" - Akamai.