Solution designed for changing enterprise IT requirements around end user mobility and development and deployment of complex applications in the cloud
Akamai® Technologies, Inc., a cloud platform for delivering secure, high-performing user experiences to any device, anywhere, has introduced Terra Alta, an enterprise-class solution designed to address the evolving complexities of application acceleration in the cloud.
Enterprises are increasingly turning to the cloud to reap economic benefits and effectively extend the reach of business applications to users outside the bounds of the traditional corporate network – both in terms of physical location and device type. At the same time, IT managers must find efficient ways to overcome issues of latency, availability, security and application control that can adversely impact web application performance and degrade the end user experience.
To help mitigate the performance challenges enterprises face when using the public Internet for application delivery, Akamai’s Terra Alta has been designed to enable an increasingly mobile enterprise user base. In addition, Terra Alta helps simplify the process of developing and deploying applications in the cloud, making it easier to optimise hundreds or thousands of applications with greater flexibility and control. As applications themselves evolve, Terra Alta helps accelerate complex applications that rely on multiple components, which may include business functions, modules, or web services from within other applications. Finally, Terra Alta can be easily deployed within an enterprises’ existing network architecture, allowing IT decision makers to avoid making changes to network equipment investments already made.
“Enterprises are increasingly extending their IT infrastructure outside of the boundaries of their own data centres – embracing cloud computing, as well as delivering content and applications over the Internet” said Lydia Leong, research vice president, Gartner. “However, they face a new array of availability and performance challenges that may impact end-user adoption, acceptance, and productivity, and need solutions for these challenges.”
At its core, Terra Alta takes advantage of the massively distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform™ to provide enterprises with an innovative set of capabilities aimed at improving the user experience for Internet-delivered applications regardless of where they are hosted. New features introduced with Terra Alta are designed to meet the requirements of enterprise and cloud readiness, increased performance and simplicity of deployment and use.
In the area of enterprise and cloud readiness, Terra Alta is intended to effectively map to the way enterprises are deploying and delivering critical business applications. Important new features in this area include:
• Enterprise EdgeSM: Recognising that web applications are hosted at the origin as well as in the cloud, Terra Alta enhances the reach of the Akamai Intelligent Platform by extending into the enterprise with Enterprise Edge. This virtual machine, running Akamai optimisation technology within a customer’s origin, allows optimisations from the Akamai Intelligent Platform to be carried from the Internet into the data centre, improving overall application performance across the entire delivery environment.
• Edge Load Balancing: For enterprises taking advantage of public cloud deployments, Edge Load Balancing is designed to ensure that application traffic can be load balanced globally across the web before traffic impacts an isolated single data centre.
• Enterprise DNS Mapping: Enables organisations to overcome the performance challenges caused by centralised DNS by dynamically adapting to user location and removing dependencies on enterprise DNS infrastructure re-designs.
With Terra Alta, Akamai is offering customers a 100 percent global performance improvement SLA over origin-alone applications. New features designed to deliver unrivaled acceleration capabilities across an extremely broad set of web applications include:
• Web Deduplication: This feature is designed to ensure that only differences in the objects that have already been sent by the origin are delivered, reducing bandwidth consumption required for application delivery and drastically increasing performance.
• Akamai Instant: Based on web analytical data, Akamai Instant retrieves what are assessed as the most likely pages to be next requested by the user, which can reduce long think times associated with web service calls, database lookups and other processing found in complex applications that can adversely affect application response times. This approach abstracts origin infrastructure challenges by leveraging Akamai’s Intelligent Platform to bring content closer to the user with fewer trips to the origin.
• Dynamic Page Caching: This capability allows pages that were previously considered dynamic and un-cacheable to be conditionally cached.
Terra Alta is designed to be easy to deploy and consume in a manner best mapped to business requirements. New capabilities designed to meet customer requirements for simplicity include:
• Streamlined packages that allow enterprises to buy sets of application slots that can be easily interchanged as dictated by business requirements – such as seasonality or proof of concept testing – supported by traffic levels designed to serve even the most demanding application needs.
• Mobile Detect and Redirect supports delivery of applications to mobile users by simplifying the process of addressing and delivering mobile business applications, which can significantly improve the user experience. The result is an enterprise-wide application optimisation platform that can be easily leveraged across any application – public cloud, origin and mobile – being delivered over the Internet.
• InstantConfig allows IT teams to quickly deploy and provision multiple applications – cloud or origin based – with a simple, dynamic, and instant configuration accomplished through the newly redesigned customer portal.
“Companies want to use the cloud as an enterprise application delivery environment because it’s the most effective and efficient way to reach the broadest set of users. Unfortunately, controlling the cloud can seriously erode the promises and expectations of cloud computing,” stated Willie M. Tejada, Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Enterprise Cloud Division at Akamai. “With the release of Terra Alta, we’re giving our customers powerful solutions specifically designed to provide the best possible performance for their entire portfolio of cloud delivered business applications.”
Terra Alta is available now with packages supporting sets of three, five and 10 applications.
The Akamai Solutions Portfolio
Terra Alta is part of the company’s new Terra Enterprise Solutions product family which is intended to empower businesses to leverage the cloud for application adoption without borders while eliminating costly networks and specialised hardware. Other solution sets leveraging the Akamai Intelligent Platform include Aqua Web Solutions designed to help customers grow revenue opportunities with fast, personalised web experiences and allow them to manage complexity such as peak demand, mobile devices and data collection; Kona Security Solutions which help organisations avoid data theft and business downtime by extending the security perimeter outside the data-centre and protect them from the increasing frequency, scale and sophistication of web attacks; Sola Media Solutions which allow businesses to engage audiences with interactive HD quality video, solve the challenges of multi-device consumption and reinvent the software distribution channel; and Aura Network Solutions which deliver the capability to operate a cost efficient network which capitalises on traffic growth and eliminates the complexity typically required to build a CDN and interconnect across providers.
FACTFILE:
Akamai® is a cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere. At the core of the Company's solutions is the Akamai Intelligent Platform™ providing extensive reach, coupled with unmatched reliability, security, visibility and expertise. Akamai removes the complexities of connecting the increasingly mobile world, supporting 24/7 consumer demand, and enabling enterprises to securely leverage the cloud. To learn more about how Akamai is accelerating the pace of innovation in a hyperconnected world, please visit www.akamai.com or blogs.akamai.com, and follow @Akamai on Twitter.
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