Akamai, who operate one of the world’s largest distributed-computing platforms, monitors global Internet conditions around the clock. With this real-time data they identify the global regions with the greatest attack traffic, cities with the slowest Web connections (latency), and geographic areas with the most Web traffic (traffic density). It does this with a network of more than 105,000 servers deployed in 78 countries. Its algorithms monitor, and help solve, Internet congestion points by optimizing routes (eliminate long routes) and replicating data dynamically in order to deliver content more quickly. While doing this, it gathers information on vulnerability problems and reports them on their Real Time Web Monitor which is available for free on the Internet.
The company was founded in 1998 by Daniel M. Lewin (then a graduate student at MIT) and MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton. Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines flight 11 which crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001. Leighton now runs the company on his own.
