Akamai Buys Prolexic To Improve Protection Against DDoS Attacks

US content delivery network Akamai has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Prolexic, a developer of cloud-based security solutions, for approximately $370 million (£226m).

Marketing its services under the slogan “DDoS attacks end here”, Prolexic has grown to become one of the largest companies of its kind.

Security products and services are an increasingly important source of revenue for Akamai too, which offers its own suite of tools to protect customers against DDoS and application-layer attacks.

“We believe that Prolexic’s solutions and team will help us achieve our goal of making the Internet fast, reliable, and secure,” said Tom Leighton, CEO and chief scientist at Akamai.

If you can’t beat them, buy them

Akamai, founded in 1988, currently has between 15 and 20 percent of all web traffic passing through its servers. The core business was built around dynamic routing of content in order to ease Web congestion and improve website reliability.

The company mirrors customers’ websites on its own servers, with Internet users able to receive content from whichever Akamai server is closer to them or has a better connection, resulting in faster load and download times, and decreasing vulnerability to outages.

In the past few years Akamai diversified into security, as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were becoming more prevalent.

Meanwhile Prolexic, established in 2003, has thousands of existing customers in e-commerce, SaaS, hospitality and gaming. Following the acquisition, Akamai will add Prolexic solutions to its own range of tools designed to protect against application-layer, network-layer and data centre attacks.

“Today, business is defined by the availability, security and latency of Internet-facing applications, data and infrastructure,” said Scott Hammack, CEO at Prolexic.

“Being able to rely on one provider for Internet performance and security greatly simplifies resolution of network availability issues and offers clients clear lines of accountability. We believe that, together, we will be able to deliver an unprecedented level of network visibility and protection.”

The closing of the transaction, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected in the first half of 2014.

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