Guest: Michael Kleef (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai (Twitter)
Show: 2024 Prediction Series

Akamai is a platform for delivering computer security and the company has been well known for content delivery over the past 25 years. This is all underpinned by the world’s largest private network. On discussing the trends he believes are coming up in 2024, Michael Kleef, VP of Product Marketing at Akamai, says, “Security is still such a big issue for organizations; they will be focusing on mitigating risk and making sure that their customers stay protected.”

Over the past 20 years, we have seen the internet continuously shift from distributed to centralized and we are now starting to see this trend with cloud which has shifted back to a centralized model. However, we are starting to see a move toward more of a distributed model and this is being reflected in the market. Akamai has always been distributed but the hyperscalers are also starting to move in that direction.

In networks, we will start to see a return to the network fundamentals of how to connect things. This will be particularly relevant as networks move out to the edge. Akamai, which has one of the world’s largest private networks with lots of traffic running across it to run high-profile events and different services, knows the importance of having that connection from the edge through to compute regions. A distributed network is needed to enable a distributed cloud.

While AI has garnered a lot of hype over the past year with lots of people excited about its potential, the conversation is likely to shift this year to how to actually use it, as well as, the cost and ROI of it. Many people are excited about using GPUs to build models but the challenge is how to execute on them since GPUs are expensive to run on. 2024 will likely see different chipsets being explored to try to reduce the costs.

Costs are predicted to continue to be a challenge in the coming year and companies are predicted to continue to look for ways to cut costs. Akamai will continue focusing on providing customer solutions to help them contain their costs with their computing platform and network.

Another challenge that companies will grapple with in 2024 is security. Although a lot of companies are protecting the front door of their applications and APIs from bot abuse and fraud, however, customers are struggling to protect themselves when ransomware gets inside their environment. The market is focusing on how to be able to segment the network in a way that prevents the spread of things like malware. Customers will be starting to look toward solutions that tackle these problems.

Akamai’s focus for 2024 will be on cost from a computing perspective. However, customer experience is still going to be an area companies will continue to invest in. This is particularly relevant for online gaming and eCommerce companies where they are focusing on the latency of the experiences they are delivering to customers and ensuring applications stay responsive. Akamai will also be helping companies mitigate risk and ensure their customers stay protected. Companies will also be identifying use cases for AI and how it can help them solve some of these pain points, accelerate businesses, and deliver better customer experiences.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.