Akamai Technologies is a leading cloud and cybersecurity services company that helps accelerate, deliver, and protect websites, applications, and multimedia content for global companies.
Q: How would you describe Akamai’s position in the Latin American cybersecurity market?
A: Our position is deeply integrated with the rapid digital adoption and modernization of financial systems across the region, such as Brazil’s instant payment system and the broader shift toward cashless societies. We are uniquely positioned with an edge platform that spans every major city in Latin America, enabling companies to deliver exceptional digital experiences. However, we understand that the best digital experience is only possible when it is secure. Therefore, our focus is creating robust cybersecurity solutions that allow organizations and digital property owners to seamlessly protect their infrastructure and end users.
Q: What role does the Latin American market play in Akamai’s global strategy?
A: Latin America represents a massive opportunity due to its significant population; as more people require digital experiences, our customers need scalable infrastructure. This demand drives us to continually proliferate our network and platform across different cities to provide the fastest and most secure connectivity possible. In addition, we are actively investing and expanding our workforce across key markets, including Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil.
Q: What are Akamai’s key competitive differentiators, and how do they translate into tangible results for your enterprise customers?
A: Our key competitive differentiator is agility. We combat the geographical challenges of Latin America by moving our intelligence and security decisions as close to the end user as possible through our distributed edge platform. For example, our recent acquisition of LayerX allows us to provide security services directly within the user browser. This means enterprise customers, such as major e-commerce platforms, can execute fraud mitigation and user authentication at the edge of the network rather than routing traffic across large distances, resulting in a significantly faster, more secure experience that is already trusted by Tier One brands throughout the region.
Q: Which industries or business verticals are you prioritizing in Latin America?
A: We work across virtually every industry, from highly regulated sectors to dynamic commercial environments. We protect critical infrastructure, such as energy generators, by securing operational technology (OT) with solutions like microsegmentation. On the other end of the spectrum, we optimize high-speed environments for massive e-commerce platforms and modern media organizations that deliver complex multimedia content. Furthermore, we maintain a strong presence in the public sector, serving government departments and large state-owned enterprise conglomerates that consume various components of our extensive technology stack.
Q: Akamai recently announced Cloud Pulse Alerts as a new real-time observability capability. What need did you identify among developers, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams, and IT departments that justified the development of this solution?
A: We recognized a critical transition in the industry from basic visibility to comprehensive observability. While visibility simply tells an organization what is happening, observability is essential for immediately identifying when things go wrong and understanding the root cause. Technology inevitably experiences failures, whether due to software bugs or internet outages, and property owners need the ability to pinpoint the exact location of a problem to react quickly and minimize the impact on their users. Cloud Pulse Alerts was developed to provide this true, full observability, enabling technical teams to maintain optimal digital experiences.
Q: As distributed architectures become more complex, observability is evolving from a mere monitoring tool into a strategic business component. How will these platforms transform Latin American industries?
A: The shift toward distributed architectures and third-party components as a service requires organizations to possess a distributed view of their entire operational environment. Observability platforms must evolve to pinpoint exactly where an application flow fails, allowing companies to seamlessly swap components or shift into targeted disaster recovery modes that prioritize mission-critical services over auxiliary functions. Furthermore, we are seeing a trend where regional regulators, particularly in the financial and critical infrastructure sectors, are beginning to mandate that organizations prove they have the required visibility and resilience mechanisms in place to secure customer data.
Q: What solutions does Akamai provide to media outlets, and what benefits do they gain from those?
A: For media organizations, reputation and trust are paramount, and any compromise to their integrity can destroy their credibility. We have observed incidents where attackers infiltrated content management systems to manipulate statistics, rewrite articles, and artificially shift public opinion, even in areas like sports journalism. Protecting the absolute integrity of the editorial workflow and securing the underlying infrastructure against these sophisticated manipulations is a critical business need, which is why so many major media outlets rely on our solutions.
The landscape has shifted fundamentally; users are increasingly bypassing traditional search engines in favor of AI applications, which drastically reduces the inbound traffic that publishers rely on for advertising revenue. To protect their intellectual property, publishers must leverage technical solutions that detect when a Gen AI scraper is attempting to harvest content for its knowledge base. Instead of expecting voluntary compensation models from AI companies, we empower content owners to force the issue by redirecting AI bots to a payment gateway.
Q: Akamai found a sharp increase in AI bot activity targeting media organizations in 2025. Beyond just blocking malicious bots, what should publishers do to distinguish between legitimate AI crawlers, content scrapers, and bots that pose security or infrastructure risks?
A: The fundamental challenge for publishers is no longer simply identifying automated traffic, but rather achieving the deep granularity required to distinguish between beneficial automation and exploitative scraping. If a publisher implements a blanket block on all AI crawlers, they risk inadvertently blocking legitimate researchers, partner syndication networks, or users navigating via permitted AI assistants. Publishers must transition from binary access models to highly granular categorizations that evaluate the exact nature, intent, and origin of every bot request before determining the appropriate response.
Akamai enables organizations to manage this complexity at scale by categorizing thousands of distinct bot signatures and providing customizable response actions. Instead of simply blocking an aggressive scraper, content owners can strategically slow down the automated requests until the bot exhausts its resources and abandons the attempt, or seamlessly redirect it to a licensing and payment system.
Q: How is the relationship between publishers, AI platforms, and users expected to change in the coming years? What role will cybersecurity play in this new landscape?
A: The established subscription models used by premium media outlets are likely to naturally extend to govern how AI platforms interact with content. In the near future, the digital identity and subscription privileges of a human user will likely need to be validated and extended to the AI bots acting on their behalf. Cybersecurity will act as the critical enabler in this landscape, providing the rigorous identity validation, observability, and real-time traffic analysis necessary to differentiate between a paying subscriber navigating through an authorized AI assistant and an unauthorized data scraper.
Q: What are Akamai’s investment and expansion priorities in Latin America for the rest of 2026?
A: Technologically, we develop solutions on a global scale, meaning our continuous investments in R&D ensure that every new product is immediately available across our entire Latin American footprint. Locally, our investment priorities by 2026 are heavily focused on expanding our talent pool and refining our go-to-market strategies.
