Did Akamai Hire the Grinch?

By David Hsieh

The online sales phenomenon continued its meteoric increase this holiday season. ComScore

reported that this Cyber Monday was the biggest ever — over $2B in e-commerce sales. Mobile

commerce revenue is up more than 50% according to Internet Retailer.

Unfortunately, for some companies, this Holiday season got off to a rocky start. Panopta published

a list of companies that experienced significant outages during the peak holiday shopping period.

Outages during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period mean lost customers, lower revenue and

brand damage. One of the benefits of an application delivery system, even legacy CDNs, is that

they improve site availability by 1) offloading demand from your web infrastructure and 2)

protecting your site from DDoS and other malicious attacks (if they offer security capabilities like

our recently announced ProxyWall).

I’m pleased to report that none of Instart Logic’s customers experienced any outages despite

record levels of traffic. Looking at the Panopta list suggests that Akamai must have hired the

Grinch because more than 40 companies on the list are Akamai customers. And that’s on desktop

sites — where Akamai supposedly performs best! The list doesn’t include mobile site outages, like

the widely-reported problems Best Buy’s mobile site experienced. Any guesses which CDN vendor

serves that site?

Relying on the antiquated architecture inherent in all CDNs is increasingly risky. Application

delivery in today’s mobile-first, cloud-centric era requires a software-based architecture that

accelerates and protects sites end-to-end from web site to device. To quote my co-worker Paddy

Ganti, “The Edge is not The End”.

Don’t let the Grinch steal your Christmas — there’s a better way. About a dozen of the companies

on Panopta’s list have already contacted us to learn more. Our RIP Akamai program makes it easy

so you should too!