Akamai expands Connected Cloud with new data centres in US, France and India

Akamai Technologies, a US-based content delivery network firm, is expanding its cloud computing services to five new locations: Paris, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Seattle, and Chennai, India. The addition of the Chennai site will provide Akamai with improved connectivity to a significant IT hub in India.  

According to a survey conducted among Akamai's partners in India in April, 48% of them estimated that 21-40% of their IT budgets would be dedicated to cloud expenditure.  

As part of its global investment strategy, the company also announced the opening of two scrubbing centres in Mumbai and Chennai in April. These facilities will provide Akamai's India customers with on-site DDoS defense and cloud adoption support.  

Akamai is introducing new premium instances for commercial workloads in the newly launched sites. Users of Akamai's object storage service will now have the capability to store up to one petabyte of data and one billion objects per bucket. 

“Distributed workloads require distributed infrastructure,” said Adam Karon, chief operating officer and general manager of the Cloud Technology Group at Akamai. “Legacy, centralized cloud architecture was not designed for the demands of developers and companies challenged with delivering better user experiences that increasingly require putting applications and data closer to the customer.”   

Initially known as a content delivery network provider, Akamai expanded into security and is now making progress in cloud computing. To compete with major players like Amazon Web Services Inc., the company made a significant acquisition of Linode LLC, an infrastructure-as-a-service platform provider, for approximately $900 million in February 2022. They further solidified their cloud computing plans with the launch of Akamai Connected Cloud earlier this year.  

In February, the company introduced its Connected Clouds platform, which allows Asia Pacific-Japan developers to build and execute workloads closer to where businesses and people connect online, thereby enhancing computing, content delivery, and application security.  

The primary objective of Akamai's latest cloud infrastructure sites is to seamlessly integrate computing, storage, database, and other services into the backbone of their edge computing network. Leveraging its extensive expertise in content delivery, the company has redesigned traditional data centre design principles to ensure efficient connections between each site and its vast global backbone.