Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai, took the audience into the journey that Akamai started 20 years ago. He explained why the foundation of the Akamai platform is architected around an Edge infrastructure, and not about a centralized approach. Using the Edge enables customers to use services around Media, Performance, Security, IoT, and Blockchain. Traffic growth at the Edge is impressive: where in 2008 1Tbps of traffic at the Edge was considered huge, the average number in 2017 was an impressive 60 Tbps. Tom highlighted the importance of serving content at the Edge, as the last-mile (the final leg of the network that delivers to the end-users) is often causing congestion, the Edge ensures good performance and experience to the end-customers.

During this talk, a case study of AliExpress is shown, one of the largest e-commerce platforms worldwide. Using the Akamai platform, AliExpress was able to increase page load speeds by 36%. This had an impressive effect on sales, as orders increased with 10% and the conversion rate skyrocketed with 27%.

Using a standard VPN solution to enable your employees to work outside the office can be a serious security risk. Akamai Zero Trust is a hassle-free solution to this problem. Zero Trust means strong access and inspection of everything, regardless of where the users are. It is one platform to secure all enterprise applications and user. You can close your firewall completely and still provide access to business applications using the Edge platform. The main benefit being: providing access at the Edge instead of the origin, keeping malicious traffic away from your data center.