Singapore Telecommunications : SingTel partners with Akamai to offer cloud-based DDoS mitigation services for enterprises in Asia Pacific

• DDoS service complements SingTel's multi-layered cyber security solutions
• The Akamai Intelligent Platform provides quicker content delivery and business continuity

Singapore,  25  September  -  Singapore  Telecommunications  Limited  (SingTel)  and Akamai® Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), today announced a partnership to offer cloud-based cyber security solutions to enterprises in Asia Pacific. This partnership will help companies strengthen their ability to cope with the volumetric and application types of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks and other malicious web attacks. The partnership will leverage Akamai's globally distributed Intelligent Platform to deliver Akamai's solutions for an enhanced customer experience.

DDoS attacks are committed by cyber criminals who stealthily command unrelated PCs and servers, often in different geographical locations, to saturate an enterprise's bandwidth in order to overwhelm it. This can overload the enterprise's servers, networks, info- communications platforms and applications, and severely disrupts normal operations and causes financial losses.

Mr William Woo, Managing Director, Enterprise Data and Managed Services said: "Enterprises today deploy mission critical applications such as enterprise resource planning, e-commerce, cloud-based applications and Unified Communications across wide area networks and the internet. While these applications help enterprises to be more productive, agile and cost efficient, they also render enterprises more vulnerable to cyber attacks such as DDoS.

"The partnership with Akamai enhances our capabilities further to deal with DDoS, one of the most prevalent and damaging cyber threats, and provide a better customer experience through faster content delivery."

The advanced cloud-based cyber security solution leverages the massive scale and capacity of a globally distributed platform to swiftly neutralise DDoS threats and keep networks and websites up during DDoS attacks. Using this solution, SingTel can pre-emptively scrutinise, detect and block DDoS threats before they reach the targeted web services.

"This extends SingTel's security perimeter and protection coverage to ensure that our customers' servers, connectivity, web infrastructure and apps are secured against critical downtime and theft of commercial data, without loss of performance," Mr Woo said.

According to Forrester, a DDoS attack costs an enterprise an estimate US$2.1 million dollars lost for every four hours of downtime and US$27 million for a 24-hour outage1. In addition, an enterprise suffers damage to its reputation and brand as well as loss of their customers' trust.

Commenting on the partnership, Sanjay Singh, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan, at Akamai said: "Akamai has a long history with SingTel, first as our customer and now as a partner, and we share their commitment to helping businesses succeed in today's hyperconnected  world.  We  believe  this  partnership  will  enable  SingTel  to  provide unparalleled security, availability and high-performance to their business customers, helping them drive their business and brand forward."

The cloud-based DDoS mitigation service adds another level in SingTel's multi-layered cyber security capabilities, which include incident response management and security analysis through SingTel's Security Operations Centres. This service is offered on a monthly subscription basis, which translates into lower operating costs as enterprises need not make hefty upfront investments in hardware and software or maintain and update the complex systems.

Enterprises will also enjoy an enhanced customer experience through the Akamai Intelligent Platform which enables enterprises to host their media libraries, software downloads or entire website in a network of servers around the world. By replicating these contents in multiple locations, enterprises can deliver them closer to users more quickly hence lowering latency. In addition, it provides an added resilience and business continuity measure as enterprises can still maintain true high-availability platform for Web content and application delivery. This reduces enterprises' need to maintain their own failover infrastructure.