Empower CISOs with Visibility, Agility, Compliance, and Strategic ROI

• CISOs are challenged to secure distributed, cloud-connected environments against sophisticated threats, making proactive and agile network defense essential.
• Akamai Prolexic Network Cloud Firewall (NCFW) moves access control to the network edge, enabling centralized, cloud-managed policy enforcement for faster and more adaptive threat response.
• Prolexic NCFW empowers security teams to rapidly define and deploy access rules globally via user interface or API, transforming incident response from reactive to proactive.
• Enterprises benefit from reduced attack surfaces, operational efficiency, improved uptime, and simplified compliance, while gaining visibility and control over their security posture.
• Built-in auditability and change tracking support regulatory requirements and facilitate easier audits and governance.
• Prolexic NCFW integrates seamlessly with existing SecOps workflows, enabling automation, minimizing response times, and reducing operational overhead.
• The solution positions security as a strategic driver of business value by managing risk, increasing resilience, and safeguarding brand reputation.

In an era where an always-available digital infrastructure is a critical necessity and may define competitive advantage, CISOs face a new strategic challenge: How to protect distributed, cloud-connected networks and cloud native applications against an increasingly dynamic and complex threat landscape — without slowing the business down.

This is especially relevant now with the recent spate of record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Traditional DDoS mitigation, perimeter firewalls, and security appliances excel at what they were designed for — reactive defense. But modern enterprises need more. They need proactive control at the network’s edge, the agility to adapt policies globally in minutes, and the transparency to meet evolving compliance and governance demands.

The need for control as well as unmatched agility for network security teams and CISOs has never been greater.

Akamai Prolexic Network Cloud Firewall (NCFW) is a cloud-managed access control list (ACL) enforcement layer that empowers users to define and enforce security at the edge of their network. Prolexic NCFW extends the protection and reach of Prolexic’s cloud-based DDoS mitigation, resulting in better visibility into a network’s security posture and robust controls to rapidly mitigate threats.

Instead of relying on downstream firewalls or waiting for configuration changes to propagate through distributed data centers, CISOs and their teams benefit from a single, centralized control plane for defining who can reach their network, from where, and under what conditions. This ultimately results in an always-available and optimally performing network infrastructure for an organization's digital assets and applications.

As the threat landscape continues to rapidly evolve with AI-powered tools and botnet as a service offerings, security leaders are adopting a more strategic position on risk mitigation, governance, and operational efficiency. By moving access control into the cloud, Prolexic NCFW aligns network defense with the realities of hybrid, multicloud, and globally distributed architectures.

Traditionally, control and simplicity were often seen as at odds or as a trade-off. Prolexic NCFW minimizes that trade-off. It allows enterprises to define, deploy, and version ACLs through either an intuitive user interface or through easy API integration.

Rules can be deployed across an organization’s global network within minutes, which delivers a level of agility that traditional firewalls simply cannot match.

This means security leaders can:

• Establish a proactive and positive security posture by selectively allowing or denying traffic
• Respond instantly to zero-day vulnerabilities without waiting for patch cycles 
• Enforce policy consistency across regions and business units 
• Contain emerging threats before they reach the enterprise perimeter 

In practical terms, it transforms incident response from reactive to proactive. When a new exploit is discovered, global rules can be deployed at the edge in a matter of minutes — buying valuable time for teams to patch disparate systems safely.

CISOs and network security teams are acutely aware of the cost of exposure. Today’s attackers move fast, exploiting even brief windows of vulnerability. 

With Prolexic NCFW, enterprises can deploy network-wide deny rules for vulnerable ports, block malicious traffic from specific geographies, or restrict access by Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) to cut off entire malicious ISPs or hosting providers rapidly.

This security at the edge approach delivers measurable benefits, including:

• Reduced attack surface: Stop untrusted traffic before it ever reaches critical infrastructure 
• Operational efficiency: Centralize global ACL management and reduce dependence on multiple firewall appliances 
• Improved uptime: Mitigate risk closer to the source, preserving application performance.

By combining Akamai’s scale with enterprise-managed control, CISOs can enforce a positive security model that allows only known, trusted traffic while denying everything else. This not only reduces attack exposure but simplifies compliance reporting and governance.

In regulated industries, visibility and accountability are as critical as mitigation itself. Prolexic NCFW offers visibility into version history, change tracking, and deployment transparency.

Every configuration change is logged with who made it, when, and where it was deployed, thereby supporting and facilitating audits, forensics, and change management reviews.

For security governance frameworks like ISO 27001, PCI DSS, or SOC 2, this built-in traceability is invaluable. CISOs can demonstrate policy enforcement consistency across global environments without needing to aggregate data from dozens of disparate systems.

In the domain of cybersecurity, speed is a critical advantage. The ability to implement network-wide changes in minutes can mean the difference between containment and compromise. Traditional change control processes — waiting for tickets, coordinating across teams, scheduling maintenance windows — simply can’t keep up with today’s threat velocity.

Prolexic NCFW’s distributed edge architecture and API-driven model have changed that dynamic. Security teams can integrate rule management directly into existing SecOps workflows, leveraging automation for continuous enforcement and instant rollback, if necessary.

This turns security agility into a strategic differentiator, enabling faster innovation without sacrificing safety.

Beyond security, Prolexic NCFW delivers measurable advantages by streamlining operations and reducing reactive work (Table 1).

Table 1: Operational advantages of Prolexic NCFW that result in speed, agility, and cost optimization for network security teams

The result: Lower mean time to respond, fewer midnight change windows, and faster compliance reporting, thereby turning Prolexic NCFW into both a security and efficiency enabler. These operational advantages translate into tangible business value and measurable ROI for CISOs and network security teams. 

Table 2 summarizes some of the key areas in which Prolexic NCFW capabilities can be directly tied to business outcomes. 

Table 2: Prolexic NCFW offers comprehensive and strategic business value for CISOs

CISOs increasingly frame cybersecurity in terms of measurable business outcomes, including risk reduction, operational efficiency, compliance readiness, and brand trust. Prolexic NCFW has become a trusted tool for CISOs to demonstrate the ROI of approaching security as a strategic business driver.

As threat actors continue to innovate by leveraging automation, AI-powered tools, and botnets at unprecedented scale, CISOs and network security teams must evolve their defenses to be equally adaptive. Prolexic NCFW delivers that adaptability by empowering them with comprehensive control and flexibility.

The strategy is clear: Defense must move to the edge. By extending visibility, control, and enforcement closer to the threat source, enterprises can shrink response times, improve resilience, and support digital transformation with confidence.

In the modern threat landscape, network security teams don’t just manage firewalls — they manage risk, resilience, and reputation. Prolexic NCFW empowers them to do all three by delivering visibility, agility, and proactive defense at a scale once thought impossible.

When every minute counts, NCFW ensures that your network security posture is resilient and optimized to serve your users.