Name: Defend Together with Akamai: Securing the AI Frontier
Start: 2026-09-30T13:00:00Z
End: 2026-09-30T13:00:24.000Z
Location: BrightTALK

Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence. Learn more at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on X and LinkedIn.

What are AI teams actually experiencing as LLM inference moves into production?

New research from 200 AI practitioners shows where teams are running into challenges with latency, scaling, infrastructure placement, and more.

In this 10-minute episode, Danielle Cook, Director of Product Marketing at Akamai Cloud, breaks down the data and what it tells us about the current state of production LLM inference.

You’ll learn:

• Where teams are hitting challenges as inference scales
• Why proximity to users and data is becoming more important
• How your infrastructure approach compares with other AI teams

See what the data says and where your team fits.

What the Data Says About AI Inference

Getting AI inference running on Kubernetes is only the beginning. What does it take to turn that deployment into a reliable production endpoint?

In this 10-minute episode, Andy Suderman, CTO at Fairwinds, and Robert Brennan, CEO and Co-Founder of OpenHands, focus on the practical path forward.

You’ll learn what to consider across:

• Capacity
• Performance
• Workload placement
• Resilience
• Platform and application ownership

Get a practical framework for moving from a working Kubernetes deployment toward production-ready AI inference.

Beyond Inference

Your Kubernetes cluster can look healthy while your inference application struggles in production.

In this 10-minute episode, Andy Suderman, CTO at Fairwinds, looks at where LLM inference on Kubernetes can start to break as workloads move from deployment to real-world demand.

You’ll learn:

• How scheduling and GPU contention affect inference workloads
• Where autoscaling assumptions can break down
• How networking can introduce latency into inference
• Why platform and application ownership matters

Find the failure points that can stand between a working deployment and reliable production inference.

Where AI Inference Breaks

AI agents are already browsing, negotiating, and transacting on behalf of credit union members—placing credit unions at the direct center of non-human identity risk. Join Michael Villar, Akamai's Director of Field Security Technology, as he examines the emerging agent-trust landscape and explores how credit unions can authenticate legitimate bots, enforce granular microsegmentation around agent mandates, and prepare for agentic payment standards shaping the future of member services.

Through Michael's industry insights, attendees will leave with a practical framework for evaluating non-human identity risk and a clear roadmap for what credit unions should pilot before autonomous agents arrive at their front door.

Know Your Agent: Identity and Trust for the Agentic Web

Think everyone else has AI inference figured out? Think again. New survey data from 200 AI practitioners shows where teams are struggling as inference moves into production:

- 49.5% cite latency at peak load as one of their hardest scaling challenges.
- 59.5% say running inference closer to users or the point of decision is critical or very important.
- Yet 45.5% still run inference from a single primary cloud region.

In this 30-minute technical discussion, we’ll combine survey data with practical Kubernetes and AI application experience to examine where production inference breaks down and what teams can do about it. You’ll learn:

- Where teams are struggling with latency, scaling, GPU capacity, workload placement, and production reliability.
- Where Kubernetes inference breaks, including GPU scheduling, bursty traffic, autoscaling, networking, latency, and ownership gaps.
- What good looks like in production, with a practical framework for capacity, performance, placement, resilience, and ownership.

The Real State of AI Inference on Kubernetes

AI applications and agentic workflows depend on APIs and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to connect models, agents, applications, data, and enterprise services. As this estate expands, organizations need to understand what exists, which assets are managed, and where security risk remains.

In this If Your APIs Could Talk episode, we'll explore how the bidirectional integration between Akamai API Security and MuleSoft connects API and MCP discovery, posture assessment, and runtime security intelligence with API management, governance, and policy workflows. You'll learn how teams can discover APIs and MCP servers across distributed environments, enrich the Akamai API Security inventory with MuleSoft context, surface Akamai security findings in MuleSoft, and identify gaps between managed and monitored assets.

Ep. 27 - Connecting API Security and Agentic Governance with Akamai and MuleSoft

As RAG architectures emerge as the backbone of modern enterprise AI applications grounded in domain-specific context, engineering teams face a growing constraint: the infrastructure cost of high-volume vector search. Traditional hyperscalers frequently provide memory-intensive configurations, driving operating expenses up and putting pressure on startup runways.

Join us for a transparent, builder-focused fireside chat with Mr Yaoquan Zhu, Senior Product Manager. GoVeda-an AI-native patent intelligence platform managing over 220 million complex documents. Discover how GoVeda broke free from standard hyperscaler constraints by migrating its memory-intensive vector database workloads to specialized cloud infrastructure, resulting in a 30% boost in search performance and a 20% reduction in cloud costs.
 
You’ll learn :
• The High-RAM Dilemma: Why scaling semantic search cripples standard cloud budgets, and how to identify right-sized alternatives.
• The GoVeda Blueprint: Strategic insights into delivering mission-critical AI inference and vector database with zero downtime.
• Performance vs. Price: Real-world metrics on how moving beyond traditional hyperscalers improves latency and data retrieval speed.

Beyond the Hyperscalers: A Fireside Chat on Optimizing Vector DB Costs for AI-Native Apps

Presented by Stas Neyman, Director of Product Marketing, API Security, this session explores how to secure applications and APIs well beyond the edge where traditional WAAP controls fall short. Attendees will discover five advanced capabilities essential for a complete API security program, including shadow API discovery, granular posture management, and streamlined remediation with code-level context. The discussion will also highlight how comprehensive compliance visibility and early API testing help catch vulnerabilities before they ever reach runtime. Ultimately, this session demonstrates how dedicated API security complements existing defenses by extending governance across the entire API lifecycle.

Defend Together with Akamai: Advanced API Security Capabilities

Frontier AI models are changing the speed and economics of cyber offense. Recent developments show that advanced models can help discover vulnerabilities, reason across complex codebases, chain weaknesses, and accelerate exploit development in ways that compress the traditional defender response window.

This threat briefing separates signal from hype. We will explain what frontier AI changes, what it does not change, and why the strongest near-term response is still grounded in practical security fundamentals: reducing exposure, prioritizing exploitability, validating continuously, tightening enforcement, and containing impact when something gets through.

Join the Akamai threat intelligence service team experts for a practical, product-neutral discussion on how security teams should understand and prepare for AI-accelerated cyber threats.

From Vulnerability Discovery to Defense: Preparing for Frontier AI Accelerated Attacks

LIVE from StreamTV Show, Denver, CO!

As streaming platforms push toward higher resolutions, larger audiences, and more dynamic monetization, the challenge is no longer just delivery—it’s processing video in real time without introducing latency. GPU-accelerated infrastructure is redefining what’s possible, enabling media companies to handle compute-intensive workloads like live transcoding, AI upscaling, and content-aware stream optimization while maintaining exceptional viewer experiences.

In this session, we will showcase how distributed, GPU-powered architectures are driving both performance and efficiency across modern streaming workflows. Through real-world examples with our partners Harmonic (live transcoding and AI upscaling) and Amagi (object detection and ad-break identification), we’ll explore how to improve video quality, increase throughput, and enable real-time ad insertion—unlocking new revenue opportunities without compromising speed or scale.

What you’ll learn:
• How GPU-powered workflows enable real-time transcoding, AI upscaling, and ad-break detection without adding latency
• Architectures for maximizing throughput and efficiency across live and on-demand streaming pipelines
• Strategies to integrate AI-driven monetization (like real-time ad insertion) directly into the stream while preserving QoE

Streaming Without Tradeoffs: Quality, Throughput, and Monetization in Real Time

From Visibility, to Enforcement, to Governed Action

As the network enters the agentic era, security teams can no longer rely on manual stitching across firewalls, cloud, SASE, and microsegmentation tools to keep pace with change. Attackers are moving faster, environments are more dynamic, and legacy security processes were not built to continuously prove what is actually reachable, whether segmentation still holds, and where exposure exists.

Join Tufin and Akamai for a 45-minute session, including a Tufin and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation demo, on how organizations can move from fragmented visibility to governed action. You’ll see how Akamai Guardicore Segmentation delivers deep visibility into application dependencies and enforces microsegmentation at the workload level, and how Tufin extends that visibility across complex hybrid, multi-vendor environments — providing the unified control plane to understand connectivity, continuously prove posture, and govern change.

You will learn how to:

-Stop lateral movement with workload-level microsegmentation
-Understand what is reachable across firewalls, cloud, and microsegmentation controls
-Prove segmentation and posture across hybrid, multi-vendor environments
-Scale governed policy and change workflows without overwhelming network and security teams
-Make Zero Trust enforcement more practical, auditable, and operationally sustainable

Stop stitching policies together by hand. See how Tufin and Akamai help security teams prove microsegmentation continuously, reduce exposure, and govern connectivity across the enterprise.

Microsegmentation in the Agentic Era: From Visibility, to Enforcement, to Governed Action

The AI revolution has turned the traditional cybersecurity playbook completely upside down, introducing a "new normal" of hyper-scaled vulnerability discovery and sophisticated, AI-driven attacks. In this session, Akamai's CSO and Sr. Director of Product Marketing strip away the hype surrounding frontier models to deliver a pragmatic, eye-opening look at how security leaders must adapt. Tune in to discover why your legacy defense frameworks are no longer fit for purpose and how to strategically reorient your security roadmap for immediate impact.

Key Topics:

● Navigating the AI Triple Threat: Understand how democratized offensive AI tools, autonomous desktop coding agents, and hyper-targeted social engineering are fundamentally straining traditional enterprise perimeters.

● Pragmatic Defense Over Hype: Learn why exclusive access to bleeding-edge frontier models matters less than building robust operational harnesses, data guardrails, and efficient triage pipelines around your existing AI infrastructure.

● An Immediate CISO Action Plan: Discover practical, low-hanging fruit strategies you can implement next week—such as accelerated patching, enhanced micro-segmentation, and robust API protections—to contain blast radiuses during this period of AI-driven upheaval.

The New Normal - Security in the Era of AI-Driven Attacks

WAAP solutions play a critical role in protecting applications and APIs from attacks at the edge. But many of the hardest API security challenges begin before traffic reaches enforcement, or require context that traditional WAAP controls were not designed to provide.
In this 20-minute session, we’ll explore five advanced API security capabilities that help security and application teams build a more complete, operational API security program:
Complete API discovery to identify APIs across the environment, including shadow, undocumented, and unmanaged APIs beyond what the edge can see.
Granular posture management to understand which APIs are exposed, misconfigured, out of policy, or failing API security best practices.
Streamlined remediation to give teams the context they need to fix issues faster, including affected APIs, repository details, code files, and ownership signals.
Comprehensive compliance visibility to accelerate governance and audit readiness across major security and regulatory frameworks.
API testing to find vulnerabilities earlier in development, before risky APIs reach runtime.
We’ll also show what these capabilities look like in practice and explain how dedicated API security complements WAAP by extending visibility, governance, testing, and remediation across the API lifecycle.

Ep. 26 Advanced API Security Capabilities: Discovery, Posture, Remediation, Compliance, and Testing

Are you wasting money on unnecessary GPU resources for AI infrastructure? Many companies overspend on cloud bills by automatically choosing expensive hardware before assessing workload needs. Learn how to align your compute choices with actual workload demands to pay only for what you need.

To learn more about Akamai's straightforward, usage-based pricing, visit: https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing

Right compute. Right time. Right Cost.

Presented by Akamai Solutions Engineer II, this session explores how to combat the "Great Deception" of highly sophisticated, AI-driven bots that use synthetic telemetry to bypass legacy, static defenses. Moving beyond basic WAF concepts, Sean will demystify how Akamai’s unified Defense-in-Depth strategy solves complex threats like account takeover, credential stuffing, and advanced scraping. Discover how global brands block millions of automated attacks using behavioral profiling and dynamic obfuscation (DTO/DVO), and watch a brief technical demonstration of real-time User Risk Scoring and device ID tracking in action.

Defend Together with Akamai: Dynamic Bot & Agent Protection in the Age of AI

With the recent emergence of frontier large language models (LLMs), the cybersecurity landscape has reached a critical inflection point. New frontier AI models have demonstrated abilities to autonomously discover zero-day vulnerabilities and develop complex exploit chains in seconds, sometimes with bugs that have remained undetected in core libraries and operating systems for decades.
 
In this webinar, you’ll learn the practical steps organizations can take, leveraging existing security controls, to minimize the risk caused by this threat. We will discuss how to limit the blast radius of an AI-driven attack, how to discover and patch vulnerabilities in real time, and how to leverage behavioral analytics to detect the reconnaissance phase. You’ll leave this webinar with a better understanding of frontier LLM threats and the tools at your disposal to counter them.

Shields Up: A Practical Approach to Neutralizing Frontier LLM Threats

API security testing is already a key part of modern development workflows, but it often involves multiple steps like configuring applications, uploading sources, and switching between tools. What if you could make that process even faster and more seamless?
In this short, hands-on session, we'll show how to use Akamai API Security Active Testing with AI assistants like Claude to test APIs directly from your development environment. This allows you to describe what you want to test in natural language, while the system handles setup and execution behind the scenes.

We'll walk through:
      •     Where friction still exists in today's API testing workflows
      •     How the Active Testing MCP integration simplifies setup and execution
      •     How to run your first security test directly from your IDE
      •     What results you get and how to act on them


By the end, you'll see how to reduce manual steps, stay in your development flow, and accelerate API testing, without changing the way your team works.

Ep. 25 Using Active Testing with Coding Assistants

Presented by Akamai Senior Solutions Engineer Christopher Harrison, this session explores how modern Web Application Firewalls have evolved far beyond the complex, noisy tools many teams remember. Christopher will demystify today’s WAF technology by walking through how Akamai's App & API Protector analyzes massive volumes of traffic using behavioral baselines, AI-driven detections, and application-aware profiling.

The session will also address common myths about WAFs — including constant tuning, excessive false positives, and breaking legitimate traffic — and explain how modern capabilities reduce operational burden while improving protection. Attendees will learn how built-in analytics and contextual visibility help security teams focus on meaningful threats instead of chasing noise, giving architects and engineers a clearer understanding of what running a modern WAF actually looks like day to day.

Demystifying the WAF: The Sophisticated Protections That Make Defending Your Web Applications Simpler

Presented by Akamai Senior Solutions Engineer Douglas Holland, this session explores how web application architecture behind the firewall drives resiliency across DNS, network, application, and infrastructure layers. Douglas will break down practical strategies for DNS redundancy, intelligent edge self-healing, Layer 7 failover, and global traffic management - showing how to design control points that prevent outages and maintain availability under adverse conditions.

Defend Together with Akamai: Engineering for Resiliency Across Control Planes

Welcome to Akamai's Defend Together, built for architects, engineers, and hands-on defenders to focus on the real challenges shaping cybersecurity today. Our first episode will cover Securing AI-Generated Code with Active Testing.

Defend Together with Akamai: Ensuring AI-Generated Code Is Secure with Active Testing

Defend Together

Presented by Pablo Vega Lazzo, Senior Solutions Engineer, this session explores how moving from basic chatbots to autonomous AI agents and MCP integrations reshapes your security posture. Direct LLM access to internal APIs and databases unlocks high-value automation, but exposes critical vulnerabilities across both network and model layers. Attendees will discover a practical, two-layer defense strategy—combining Akamai App & API Protector at the perimeter with Akamai Firewall for AI for real-time prompt and response inspection. Ultimately, this session provides a concise technical blueprint to block threats like prompt injection, data leaks, and API abuse while accelerating AI adoption safely.

Defend Together with Akamai: Securing the AI Frontier

Cyber Security

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IT Security

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Defend Together with Akamai: Securing the AI Frontier

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