So, What’s the Best Way to View Akamai Connected Cloud?

Think of Akamai Connected Cloud as an avenue for augmenting customers’ cloud computing environments — not replacing them (as tends to be the case when it comes to any non-hyperscaler cloud provider).

“Akamai Connected Cloud does not have the same breadth of services as AWS, Azure and Google, so it won’t be appropriate for every workload,” says IDC’s McCarthy. “However, it does include the essential compute, storage and managed databases that are needed by many general purpose workloads. It will be attractive to customers that are looking for a simplified way of building and managing cloud applications.”

Gartner’s Brandon Medford, principal analyst, agrees.

“Akamai Connected Cloud is not best viewed as directly competitive to the broad scope of offerings from cloud infrastructure and platform services providers like AWS, Azure and GCP,” Medford tells Channel Futures. “It would not be a strong fit to the entire range of use cases enterprises require of cloud in that context.”

The potential for differentiation, however, “lies in its suitability for latency and performance-sensitive workloads derived from integration with Akamai’s infrastructure and platform,” Medford says.

Akamai Connected Cloud, he adds, “is a good fit for applications that must communicate between multiple cloud environments.”

That’s also part of what makes Akamai’s announcement about its data egress prices (more on that in a bit) so critical, he says. Overall, Medford adds, “I expect that Connected Cloud will further the conversation of new use cases and application topographies.”