Akamai Private Networking

Name: Akamai Private Networking
Brand: Akamai Technologies
Rating: 3.9 (857 reviews)

Leader

At Akamai, we make life better for billions of people, billions of times a day

Est 1998|Valuation $16.6B|Raised $361.8M

LinkedIn 592K|Website|Web traffic 2.2M|FTEs 11,000|HQ Cambridge, Massachusetts, US

MarketsCloud Infrastructure Providers (IaaS/PaaS)Cloud Infrastructure Providers (IaaS/PaaS)

01Competitive Landscape

Narrative analysis

- Areas of relative strength: Organizations deploying on Akamai Cloud may find the inclusion of private networking and the lack of transfer counting for internal traffic attractive for certain architectures. The distributed region capability can be relevant for edge-oriented deployments. - Where hyperscalers have advantages: AWS, GCP, and Azure typically offer a broader set of advanced networking services, larger region footprints, and a more extensive ecosystem of integrated services. - Where ZTNA/overlay solutions are more appropriate: If the primary requirement is identity- and device-based user access to applications across heterogeneous environments, ZTNA or overlay solutions can reduce reliance on VPC-level segmentation and may be faster to deploy in hybrid environments.

	Akamai Private Networking (Akamai Cloud VPC/VLAN)	Cloudflare Zero Trust (Access + private routing)	Tailscale (WireGuard overlay)
Starting Price	Included with Akamai Cloud platform (standard compute costs still apply)	Free tier available; published per-user and plan pricing available from the vendor	Free personal plan; published business-tier per-user pricing available from the vendor
Typical use case	Workloads hosted on Akamai Cloud that require segmentation and private east–west traffic	Identity-based private app access across environments (ZTNA)	Private connectivity across clouds, on-premises, and devices without rearchitecting VPCs
Key strengths	Private networking included with platform primitives; VPC includes subnet segmentation and NAT/public interface options	Identity and access policy controls oriented to user-to-app access; broad support for mixed environments	Simplicity, cross-environment connectivity, end-to-end encryption, rapid deployment
Key weaknesses	VPC region availability limits; platform incidents and support variability can impact operations; fewer advanced cloud-native networking features than hyperscalers	Not a VPC replacement for intra-cloud networking; per-user pricing model and enterprise features depend on plan	Not a native VPC; relies on agents/keys; may not meet some enterprises’ preferences for native cloud segmentation

01Competitive Landscape

Narrative analysis

Areas of relative strength: Organizations deploying on Akamai Cloud may find the inclusion of private networking and the lack of transfer counting for internal traffic attractive for certain architectures. The distributed region capability can be relevant for edge-oriented deployments.
Where hyperscalers have advantages: AWS, GCP, and Azure typically offer a broader set of advanced networking services, larger region footprints, and a more extensive ecosystem of integrated services.
Where ZTNA/overlay solutions are more appropriate: If the primary requirement is identity- and device-based user access to applications across heterogeneous environments, ZTNA or overlay solutions can reduce reliance on VPC-level segmentation and may be faster to deploy in hybrid environments.

	Akamai Private Networking (Akamai Cloud VPC/VLAN)	Cloudflare Zero Trust (Access + private routing)	Tailscale (WireGuard overlay)
Starting Price	Included with Akamai Cloud platform (standard compute costs still apply)	Free tier available; published per-user and plan pricing available from the vendor	Free personal plan; published business-tier per-user pricing available from the vendor
Typical use case	Workloads hosted on Akamai Cloud that require segmentation and private east–west traffic	Identity-based private app access across environments (ZTNA)	Private connectivity across clouds, on-premises, and devices without rearchitecting VPCs
Key strengths	Private networking included with platform primitives; VPC includes subnet segmentation and NAT/public interface options	Identity and access policy controls oriented to user-to-app access; broad support for mixed environments	Simplicity, cross-environment connectivity, end-to-end encryption, rapid deployment
Key weaknesses	VPC region availability limits; platform incidents and support variability can impact operations; fewer advanced cloud-native networking features than hyperscalers	Not a VPC replacement for intra-cloud networking; per-user pricing model and enterprise features depend on plan	Not a native VPC; relies on agents/keys; may not meet some enterprises’ preferences for native cloud segmentation