All About Interwebz: Akamai unveils its big push for the global cloud market

Akamai has unveiled details on its Connected Cloud, a new service that has been in the works since it acquired cloud hosting provider Linode for $900 million in 2022.

Creating its distributed edge and cloud platform, Akamai will use the existing 11 Linode sites along with the same 4,100 sites in 134 countries that already power its own edge network.

The company hopes that the new platform will help users “[keep] applications and experiences closer and threats farther away.”

Akami Connected Cloud

Three new sites are planned to be live by this summer, which will form the template for a further 10 core sites that the company hopes to roll out in the last six months of the year.

Further supporting its network, Akamai has also unveiled plans to roll out distributed sites that should “bring basic cloud computing capabilities” to hard-to-reach regions that the company currently claims are underserved. It has identified more than 50 cities for these.

Connected Cloud is designed with ultra-low latency at its core in a move that Akamai hopes will see media, gaming, SaaS, retail, government, and more industries well served.

Besides this, many of the organizations it serves will also benefit from increased compliance with standards, including ISO, SOC 2, and HIPAA, allowing them to move workloads among clouds with fewer risks.

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“Akamai's leadership position at the edge enables us to scale everything we touch: We scale content, putting digital experiences closer to users than anyone. We scale cybersecurity, keeping threats farther away from business and people. Our customers know us and trust us for this scale. Now we plan to scale cloud computing, to provide customers with better performance at a lower cost," noted Akamai co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton.

While there’s no precise word on pricing, the company did share this statement that indicates some pretty competitive pricing:

“The new pricing structure is able to use the power of Akamai's network to drive down the cost of cloud egress by bringing CDN-like economics to cloud data transfer. The new egress pricing model is designed to result in significantly discounted egress rates relative to the hyperscalers and alternative cloud providers.”