Likely on the phone in your hand, while you’re playing this very podcast, is an app or site using Akamai in the background, so that you can listen, search, and discover new information as fast as you can think, type, or speak. Accelerating the delivery of the right content and blocking potentially harmful content are the nitty-gritty details that Akamai solves to give you a safe and seamless experience. Leading the charge to improve security and accelerate connectivity is Dr. Robert Blumofe, Executive Vice President and CTO of Akamai. 

Main Takeaways

• Power and Protect Together: A common problem with security is that it slows things down for users and causes them to want to avoid using the security measures in the first place. To solve this problem, Dr. Blumofe explains that Akamai has integrated security and performance products on its platform so that they can work cooperatively. The lesson here for any sort of business is to constantly be considering how security and performance can function seamlessly so that neither is hindered by the other,
• Endpoint to Endpoint Mindset: Since the world is becoming more remote and more open, security must adapt to this environment. According to Dr. Blumofe, this means the framework of being on a network versus off a network is no longer really applicable. Instead, it is more helpful to consider how apps are connected together from one endpoint to another.
• The Office as a Coffee Shop: You can think about a new problem, like an increase in remote work, as being stressful, or as a chance to reframe it as an opportunity. Dr. Blumofe points out that returning to the office for face-to-face time will be even more purposeful — sort of like hanging out at the coffee shop with colleagues. He describes solving for the new remote office network as a high-performance coffee shop as being a “freeing and enabling concept.” The new perimeter-less architecture of access can actually facilitate collaboration.

For a more in-depth look at this episode, check out the article below.

Article: 

Likely on the phone in your hand, while you’re playing this very podcast, is an app or site using Akamai in the background, so that you can listen, search, and discover new information as fast as you can think, type, or speak. Accelerating the delivery of the right content and blocking potentially harmful content are the nitty-gritty details that Akamai solves to give you a safe and seamless experience. Leading the charge to improve security and accelerate connectivity is Dr. Robert Blumofe, Executive Vice President and CTO of Akamai. 

“What we’re seeing is this evolution toward a perimeter-less world where applications can live anywhere and employees can work from anywhere,” Dr. Blumofe said. “The way you want to glue all that together, your applications and your employees, is no longer with a private network, but rather it’s with end to end access mechanisms. You hear language like, ‘zero trust.’ It’s not a term I love. I don’t love the word ‘zero trust’ but the concept is the right concept, which is that you have endpoints and you want to control the conversation between those endpoints. [You want to control] what users can speak to which applications; which applications can speak to which other applications and so on — all that has to be tightly controlled. You really think of it as endpoint to endpoint; not ‘on network’ versus ‘off network’.” 

A new way of thinking about the problem is often the first step towards coming up with innovative solutions. Dr. Blumofe described the evolution of thinking about this problem over the past decades, and then explained Akamai’s solution. Akamai is rethinking possible solutions with an ‘endpoint to endpoint’ mindset instead of the traditional way of thinking about networks. 

“In a more traditional approach…oftentimes cybersecurity can get in the way of performance. It actually slows things down and your end-users, your customers, [and] your employees end up with a bad experience,” Dr. Blumofe said “Whenever your employees or your customers are getting a bad experience, from a performance point of view, obviously that’s a negative thing. It makes it harder to adopt the key security mechanisms that you really need to protect yourself. So, whenever you have security and experience running counter to each other, that’s a huge problem. What we’ve done is we’ve built our performance products and our security products on the same platform. It’s one platform.”

Dr. Blumofe contends that this sort of innovative, integrated platform allows security and performance to operate in conjunction.  

In this episode of IT Visionaries, you’ll also hear Dr. Blumofe’s strategy for growth and scaling his team. Hiring the right people is not as straightforward as it may sound in the tech world. 

“We want to recruit people that are going to contribute not only to the products themselves but also to the culture,” Dr. Blumofe said. “It’s less about a checkbox of a bunch of specific skills and more about, ‘Do you really fit in with this culture and can you work with these people? And can you have fun with these people, and develop collaboratively with these people?’ A lot of job skills can be learned over time and can be developed on the job. So the culture fit is important and the people who are curious and have this approach of lifelong learning can make a big difference.”

That unique approach to hiring has the potential to drive teamwork that can lead to innovation. The explosion of remote work in recent years has also forced CTOs around the world to have a new mindset around access and security. 

“I’m very fond of this metaphor of thinking about the office building of the future as a private coffee shop with great wifi because I really think that’s where we’re headed,” Dr. Blumofe said. You go to the office building for a reason. You don’t just do it by default, because you woke up in the morning and, of course, you go to the office building — that’s the world we used to live in… Now, you do it for a reason, because you want to work face to face with your colleagues. You want to share a meal together; you want the conviviality of your peers. In doing so, it’s not unlike working from a private coffee shop; just, hey, you’ve got your colleagues next to you. There’s no reason that you need to architect the network any differently really, and that’s a very freeing and enabling concept when you start thinking of all access as remote access and you start thinking about the office building as really a private coffee shop with great wifi.”

To hear more discussions like this, tune into IT Visionaries twice a week and check out our catalog of past episodes! 

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