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| Tom Leighton, CEO and co-founder of Akamai Technologies, speaks during a press conference at the Conrad Seoul hotel, Wednesday. / Courtesy of Akamai Technologies Korea |
Edge computing is described as a mesh network of small data centers. By placing smaller data centers close to end users, it improves data processing speed, unlike cloud computing, which is heavily dependent on massive data centers.
Stating that the industry's attention to high-speed data transmission is higher than ever thanks to the deployment of 5G network technology, Leighton said edge computing is better capable of dealing with exponentially growing data.
"The Edge is located in the last mile of the network at the end-user level and is the place where networks are connected to user devices. The Edge provides a massive volume of data to end-users at locations closest to them, compared to cloud data centers that have limited capacity to hold data," the CEO said. "Core data centers are farther from users so latency issues are always existing. They are also great targets for hackers."
The company has been delivering daily web traffic reach more than 50 terabits per second though its edge computing service called the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform, consisting of 265,000 edge servers in 136 countries.
"We have 4,000 locations in thousands of different cities in 136 countries. Here in Asia, we have 1,100 locations in 235 cities, and for Korea alone we have 28 locations in eight cities," he said.
Established in 1998, Akamai is known for commercializing a technology called content delivery network (CDN), which involves distributing and relaying connections between data centers and end users to facilitate data transmission and avoid network congestion.
Many media companies and game companies have been using Akamai's CDN service to deliver high-quality video streaming of mega sports events such as the World Cup and the Olympics, as well as online games.
Leighton added Akamai has seen a growing presence in the cybersecurity industry as well. "We have talked about hitting a $1 billion revenue next year in security. I do think there is a lot of growth in security," the CEO said adding the company has seen an annual growth of 30 percent in the sector.
