Akamai Technologies and Trustwave have announced a new strategic alliance designed to help businesses more effectively fight a wide range of malicious online activities through vulnerability assessment, denial of service prevention and incident response.
The partnership has a distribution element to it: Akamai and Trustwave plan to make available to their respective customers select technology solutions and security services from each company’s portfolio. Notably, Trustwave will offer Akamai’s managed DDoS protection services as part of the Trustwave portfolio of managed security services. According to Akamai’s Q1 2015 State of the Internet: Security Report, the first quarter of 2015 set a record for the number of DDoS attacks recorded on Akamai’s Prolexic network—more than double what was reported in Q1 2014.
And, Akamai will offer Trustwave incident response and readiness services delivered by Trustwave SpiderLabs, a team of more than 150 ethical hackers, forensic investigators and researchers who conduct hundreds of data breach investigations per year. The service includes on-call responders and results in an actionable, tested plan to detect, triage and contain a breach.
But the more strategic part of the relationship involves platform collaboration. For instance, on the security scanning and testing front, Akamai will offer Trustwave Managed Security Testing to find and fix vulnerabilities across database, network and application assets, through the cloud-based Trustwave TrustKeeper platform. A full 96 percent of applications harbored one or more serious security vulnerabilities, according to the 2014 Trustwave Global Security Report—a finding that demonstrates the need for more application security testing during the development, production and active phases, as well as deployments of web application firewalls for additional protection.
“Through this new alliance, Trustwave and Akamai will deliver more advanced threat and vulnerability management solutions to help businesses fight cybercrime, protect data and reduce risk,” said Robert J. McCullen, chairman and CEO at Trustwave. “We believe that augmenting the broad portfolio of security services we provide to businesses by adding distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack protection and cloud-based web application firewall services provided by an industry innovator like Akamai will greatly benefit our customers.”
Also, Trustwave will augment its existing web application firewall (WAF) portfolio, which currently includes both a managed WAF service and on-premises product, by offering Akamai’s cloud-based Kona Site Defender for businesses that prefer a cloud deployment option. Akamai and Trustwave intend to co-develop Trustwave managed service offerings for the Akamai Kona Site Defender and WAF products.
“Akamai has significant respect for the people, services and technology behind Trustwave,” explained Stuart Scholly, senior vice president and general manager of the Security Business Unit at Akamai. “By working together, our customers can augment their security posture with proven solutions and expertise, providing an even greater level of preparation and protection backed by the global, industry-leading managed security services from Trustwave. We believe adding Trustwave solutions to our portfolio will be of great benefit to our customers.”