CDN Breakthroughs

As operator of one of the world’s largest and most important content delivery networks, Akamai has become one of the poster children for the age of the Cloud and for what may be wrong with it. Greenpeace included it on the list of high-profile tech companies representative of the Cloud’s environmental impact, thereby thrusting the company into the limelight of public scrutiny of the issue.

The CDN provider was one of only two companies to receive an ‘A’ on the environmentalist organization’s 2012 report cardthat scores companies on the lengths they go to in reducing their impact on the environment. The other company with an ‘A’ was Google.

We’re in the midst of a revolutionary shift in the enterprise data center that has not been seen in decades. At its core, this shift is being driven by the rise of “soft” infrastructure. Virtual machines and virtual networks and storage can be provisioned and reconfigured rapidly and in a highly automated way, rather than being limited by the constraints of hardware infrastructure that was built for a much less dynamic environment. The “software-defined data center,” as it is commonly known, has business repercussions that go well beyond transforming data center technology. It has shaken long-term alliances between technology giants. Vendors are scrambling to reposition themselves to best exploit this new era of soft IT.