Every minute of downtime costs businesses money, trust, and competitive advantage. At Akamai, we measure ourselves not in quarterly SLA credits, but in the confidence that our customers have when their business-critical operations depend on our platform. That confidence is earned through our history of more than 25 years of operational excellence and a relentless focus on what matters most: Keeping you online when others go down.
As I write this, another cloud provider is experiencing their third outage this quarter. While frequently lauded for innovation, today’s IT teams responsible for mission-critical applications for their customers are learning yet another painful lesson about the true cost of unreliability.
We've all been there. The 2 AM escalation calls. The situation rooms that stretch into days. The executive explanations. These aren't just technical failures; they're business failures that ripple through entire organizations.
Operational excellence isn’t easy, but it’s our responsibility
As Chief Operating Officer, I spend a lot of time focusing on how Akamai can maintain operational excellence. Our target is simple but ambitious: Our platform cannot go down. This includes everything from hardware failures and software updates to the increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks we deflect daily through our security infrastructure. Our platform now represents our largest revenue driver and is trusted by the world's most targeted enterprises.
Achieving this level of reliability requires more than redundancy. It demands a fundamentally different approach to platform architecture and operations. Every metadata update, every software deployment, every configuration change goes through staged rollouts and sophisticated testing protocols designed to prevent cascade failures.
We've invested significantly in automated systems that detect and isolate issues in milliseconds, not minutes. And our engineers have built defensive mechanisms based on decades of operating at internet scale.
James Kretchmar, our CTO for Cloud Technology, recently shared the technical details of how we achieve this reliability with ITPro's Rory Bathgate. For those interested in the engineering philosophy behind our uptime, Kretch's lessons-learned post provides practical insights from this year's operational challenges and how we turned them into platform improvements.
Reliability is critical as technology evolves, but the gap is widening, not shrinking
The market is dividing into two categories: the core platforms that define scale and stability, and the others that treat it like a commodity.
The core platforms treat reliability as essential to their business model, and focus on reliably advancing innovation with predictable performance, security, and reliability.
The other platforms push messages of rapid innovation and continuous deployments, constantly seeking attention to generate interest while shunting off reliability as a cost center.
This is a formula that makes outages inevitable. And frequent.
Some enterprises have accepted quarterly outages as the price of cheaper cloud services. They shouldn't. A major online business losing an hour of revenue every quarter accepts more than just technical debt; they are conceding to a competitive disadvantage. In an era in which customer experience determines market winners, reliability is not negotiable.
Why the world's most demanding enterprises trust Akamai
Major banks process billions of dollars through our platform because they can't afford transaction failures. Global retailers run their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on our infrastructure because peak traffic times are when reliability matters most. Media companies stream major events to millions of people because buffering isn't an option when the world is watching. These organizations need a partner whose business model aligns with their success.
Our strongest customer relationships are forged during critical moments when our teams work side by side to solve complex challenges. When you've seen Akamai engineers stay on bridge calls for days to ensure your business stays online, when you've watched our platform absorb massive DDoS attacks without blinking, and when you've experienced our "customer first" mentality during actual emergencies — that’s when trust transforms into partnership.
Your business runs on platforms, not promises
Perfect uptime doesn't exist. Any vendor claiming otherwise is selling fiction. But the distance between "near perfect" and "good enough" is measured in millions of dollars of lost revenue, thousands of frustrated customers, and immeasurable brand damage.
At Akamai, we've chosen to optimize for reliability even when it's more difficult, more expensive, and more complex. Because your business doesn't run on promises — it runs on platforms that stay up.
AI workloads demand real-time inference because cyberthreats evolve by the hour and customer expectations only increase. In this reality, reliability isn't just about uptime, it's about having a partner who treats your operational excellence as inseparable from their own.
Don't compromise on reliability. Your business depends on it.
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