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Amsterdam, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Miami, Osaka and Sao Paulo, in addition to the Lombardy capital: these are the cities that host Akamai’s third battery of new core computing sites after the completed acquisition of Linode (American hosting services provider) last years and represent another important piece of the evolution strategy dictated by the Cambridge company for a more distributed and decentralized cloud. The declared objective, in fact, is to be an outsider in a market that has long been dominated by large hyperscale suppliers by providing client companies with an infrastructure that can guarantee the maximum possible performance in workload processes by eliminating the economic and performance that today requires their transit across different continents. In other words, and following the moves made by large providers such as Google and Oracle with the sweeping opening of their respective Cloud Regions, Akamai is also decisively focusing on the availability of a low latency and globally scalable architecture to guarantee to its enterprise-class customers access to cloud computing solutions (grouped in the proprietary Connected Cloud platform which relies on an Edge network backbone extended across over 4,100 points of presence in 131 countries) towards high-intensity connection points data and closer to the systems that provide services to end users. An approach that the American company defines as “outside-in, distributed-first” and which aims to overcome the limits of the centralized cloud with a model according to which the dimensions of the network become as important as those of the data center.
The new Global Core Compute
The presence in Milan, as Akamai spokespersons confirm, represents a fundamental point of reference in a market that has seen demand for cloud services grow by 250% between 2015 and 2022. The Italian data center will also support customers in the South Europe and the Middle East while the one in Amsterdam, which hosts the second largest Internet Exchange in the world, will join the Stockholm office to provide cloud connectivity to companies in North Western Europe. Among the other newly opened core computing sites, which are added to the 13 activated in the last 90 days by Akamai across the United States, Europe and Asia, the one in Osaka stands out, which will connect all 125 million inhabitants of Japan to the Akamai.