As the digital landscape continues to evolve, security and performance have become critical concerns for enterprises. The rise of sophisticated cyber threats has fueled the demand for more robust solutions to protect applications and network infrastructures. Akamai, a global leader in cloud and security solutions, is at the forefront of addressing security challenges through innovative technologies.
In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review at MWC Barcelona 2025, Pierre Ehsani, Senior Director of Product Management at Akamai, highlighted how the company is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to address security and performance concerns and emphasized the growing significance of application programming interface (API) security in global digital transformation.
Drawing on your expertise in product management, what are the key trends shaping the future of application security and performance, and how is Akamai adapting to these changes?
In terms of applications, we are seeing several key trends in application security and performance. For instance, as organizations undergo digital transformation and adopt more modern applications, they must manage a growing number of applications along with the increasing API traffic that comes with them. As APIs become the backbone of digital interactions, they’re also a prime target for cyber threats, making real-time API security a necessity, not an option.
Another key area is API security, which presents new challenges. For example, organizations must identify all API endpoints, assess their security posture, determine whether they are authorized, and understand how they are being used by partners or 3rd parties. We’re seeing that many traditional security solutions are struggling to provide API visibility and protection required for modern applications.
Additionally, AI is playing an important role in how attackers are now positioning their actions with more advanced and faster attacks that are harder to detect. As a result, security organizations are leveraging AI to enhance their defenses, strengthen security services, and improve threat detection and control.
To consolidate and simplify security services, organizations are looking for comprehensive security solutions that cover aspects such as application, infrastructure, and user access.
We have significantly focused on security and cloud compute during the past few years, and have substantially invested in application security. More importantly, our security solutions enable customers to effectively monitor API traffic, discover unauthorized and vulnerable API endpoints, and protect organizations from API-targeted threats.
We have also been increasing our investment in AI to enhance protection. At Akamai, we are continuously strengthening our capabilities in API security, application security, micro-segmentation, and DDoS protection to help businesses secure their digital assets. Our goal is to provide a consolidated security approach that simplifies protection across applications, APIs, and multi-cloud environments—helping organizations to stay ahead of evolving threats.
Akamai plays a crucial role in securing and optimizing digital experiences. From a product management perspective, what are the biggest challenges in balancing security, speed, and scalability for businesses today?
Balancing security with performance, scalability, and usability is an ongoing challenge that many organizations face. Since you’re adding security layers, if it’s not done correctly, you could introduce additional latency, affecting the overall experience. However, in today’s world, even a fraction of latency drives away subscribers or customers.
Scalability in security is just as crucial as its implementation. You need to make sure your security dynamically scales with your applications and infrastructure as your organization grows.
In terms of user experience, there are a lot of solutions that rely on additional software and connectors, making it more difficult to adopt and rule out services. From an API security perspective, we have a more comprehensive security solution that covers all aspects. With API security, we can detect behaviors in API traffic, discover API endpoints, and provide an easy way for organizations to detect and mitigate various vulnerabilities in API user experience.
We have a variety of security solutions and services that are either network-wide or network-based. Through these services, we can provide role-out security services to customers without the need for hardware or software deployment. Whether we’re protecting IoT solutions or endpoint devices, we offer comprehensive security across a wide range of environments.
From a performance perspective, we leverage Akamai Connected Cloud which connects core cloud computing and edge computing to apply security policies at the edge rather than relying on a centralized security solution which can potentially introduce delays. By distributing some of the security controls to the edge of the network, we can provide security controls faster without any delays in the overall user experience and behavior.
Our goal is to make security seamless —so businesses don’t have to compromise between protection, performance, scalability, and usability.
As cyber threats become more sophisticated, how is Akamai leveraging AI and automation to enhance security and threat mitigation in its product offerings?
AI is becoming commonly used by many cyber attackers, and our goal is to make sure our customers and organizations stay ahead of these cybercriminals and attackers. One of the key areas we’re focusing on is threat intelligence, which we feed into many of our products to protect our customers from a variety of threats. We have been using machine learning (ML) and AI-based analysis to enhance our algorithms, ensuring greater security efficiency and more effective threat intelligence. This enables us to deliver robust threat detection and real-time threat feeds to our products and customers. We are also using ML and a variety of AI approaches to more effectively analyze the large volume of traffic and data across Akamai Connected Cloud network. This allows us to identify anomalies and potential threats faster than traditional methods.
We’re also using machine learning to improve predictive threat intelligence. Instead of just reacting to known threats, our models proactively identify patterns and emerging attack vectors, enabling businesses to stay ahead of cybercriminals. By continuously learning from new data, our threat detection becomes more effective over time.
Automation is another crucial piece of our strategy. With automated threat mitigation, our security solutions can instantly respond to attacks without waiting for manual intervention. This reduces response times and ensures protection even against the most sophisticated threats.
Ultimately, AI and automation allow us to provide stronger, faster, and more adaptive security—so businesses can focus on growth without worrying about evolving cyber risks. At Akamai, we’re committed to continuously innovating in this space, ensuring that security stays a step ahead of attackers.
What are the most common security gaps among organizations adopting cloud infrastructures, and how does Akamai help bridge these vulnerabilities?
As organizations move towards the cloud, traditional parameter-based security solutions are no longer effective. This is because there are no defined parameter in the cloud. This shift has introduced a new demand for security products, and that’s what we’re focusing our efforts
One of the key gaps is zero-trust access. In a cloud environment, it's crucial to ensure that users have access only to authorized applications based on identity, context, and necessity. To achieve this, implementing zero-trust network access (ZTNA) is essential as it provides the right level of access while maintaining strict security controls.
As applications move to the cloud, they may become vulnerable to threats, making it essential to ensure that one compromised application or workload does not impact others or applications or workloads. To achieve this, organizations need to implement micro-segmentation, which helps protect applications within cloud or hybrid environments and prevents attacks from spreading laterally once access is gained.
For growing applications, there are significant concerns regarding API security postures, the type of API you’re using, and the identification of vulnerable APIs, in particular, if those APIs are used for sensitive data.
Those are the three key gap areas that we’re seeing in the market. As organizations undergo digital transformation, consideration is needed. At Akamai, we help bridge these gaps by providing holistic security capabilities covering Application Security, Advanced API security, intelligent micro-segmentation, and Zero Trust to secure cloud applications at every layer. By replacing outdated perimeter-based security with modern, adaptive protection, we help organizations stay secure in a cloud-first, hybrid workforce environment.
What innovations or enhancements can we expect from Akamai in the ‘Power & Protect’ business vertical to help organizations stay ahead of emerging threats?
There’s a lot of activity in this space; the law of innovation is occurring again and our goal is to make sure that our customers, and the organizations we’re serving, stay ahead of cyber attackers and security threats.
One key area of innovation is AI-driven threat intelligence. We’re enhancing our security solutions with machine learning-powered detection and response, allowing us to identify and mitigate threats in real-time. This means our customers can proactively defend against emerging attack patterns rather than just reacting to them.
Another major enhancement is next-generation API security. With APIs becoming a primary attack vector, we’ve invested in advanced API discovery, anomaly detection, and automated protection to help businesses secure their growing API ecosystems.
We’re also pushing forward with zero-trust architecture to help businesses reduce risk in an increasingly perimeter-less world. Our micro-segmentation and access control solutions ensure that even if attackers gain access to part of the network, they can’t move laterally and cause widespread damage.
Additionally, we’re improving DDoS and bot mitigation. Attackers are using bots and AI to launch more sophisticated automated attacks, and Akamai is countering this with behavioral analytics, AI-driven bot detection, and ultra-low latency mitigation solutions—all deployed at the edge to stop threats before they reach critical infrastructure.
We are introducing new monetizable security services targeting MSPs and carriers, enabling them to protect their SMB and residential subscribers from a variety of attacks across both fixed and mobile networks, without the need for extensive integrations or capex investments.
The company will also focus on the Akamai Connected Cloud and the improvement of services and capabilities in cloud computing. We are expanding our presence in cloud computing, core, and edge points. We’re also providing new services and focusing on cloud-native services like Kubernetes management services and container management services to enable organizations to run their applications in modernized cloud environments.
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