Businesses are rapidly moving to the cloud and a [recent IDG survey]() indicates that 70% of businesses have at least 1 application in the cloud and 16% plan to take their first app to the cloud in the next 12 months. However public cloud providers present their own [challenges](). They are unreliable which results in downtime, do not focus on performance which results in sluggish customer experiences, and are inflexible which reduces your freedom to pursue the most optimal cloud strategy. This means that the world class digital experiences you create to delight customers, sharpen competitive edge and boost revenue may prove ineffective if you rely solely on public cloud platforms. This is the first blog post in a series of three posts that explains how you can leverage Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform to maximize the value of your cloud infrastructure. By delivering 95 Exabytes of data over billions of devices every year, Akamai provides the [world's largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform](). It provides scalability, availability, and performance needed to maximize engagement and revenue. The platform seamlessly integrates with public cloud providers so that your digital experiences reach customers quickly, reliably and securely. **Deliver superior web, mobile and video experiences** Slow is the new down - 53% of people abandon a site that takes over 3 seconds to load! Public cloud providers focus primarily on uptime and availability and maintain just enough points of presence to make an application reachable, and can fail over in the case of a datacenter outage. They do not have the visibility, automation and [ dedicated teams]() to continuously optimize Internet routes to deliver a higher quality of service. All of this results in sub-optimal user experience and slow performing apps and websites. Customers don't have the patience for slow performance and will quickly go elsewhere - and in today's digital economy, there's always an alternative. Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform empowers you to deliver superior web, mobile and video experiences to maximize customer engagement and revenue. * The platform's globally distributed network brings your digital content as close as possible to customers. It provides solutions to extend your business logic to the globally distributed network, resulting in improved experiences and simplified operations. * The platform delivers over 95 Exabytes of data across billions of devices every year. This data powers platform's integrated machine learning engine that [automatically routes content using the optimized internet routes](), avoiding congestion points and outages. By leveraging machine learning engines and cutting edge technologies such as HTTP2 and IPv6, the platform determines digital content that customers are most likely to request and [automatically pushes that content to them ]() before they request it. This results in fast, consistent and exceptional digital experiences to customers. * Businesses are increasingly embracing 'HTTPS everywhere' after industry leaders proved that it [improves customer engagement and loyalty](). For example, Google ranks HTTPS websites higher and provides visual cues to increase customer trust and confidence. With Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform, you can effortlessly deliver HTTPS traffic for all your web properties. The platform also makes it extremely efficient to purchase and manage SSL certificates - the key components in encrypting the connection between web servers and browsers. **Maximize availability and scalability, plus reduce cloud adoption risks** Most public cloud platforms autoscale based on the demand for your applications. [In reality though, autoscaling is not instantaneous as it takes several minutes to spin up new instances](). This delay can be disastrous during times of peak traffic or during a DDoS attack. The Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform provides numerous solutions to maximize the availability and scalability of your applications for exceptional customer experiences. * The platform connects customers to your data centers (both cloud based and on-premises) via optimized Internet routes to provide rapid access to dynamic applications. However, if these Internet routes encounter slowdowns due to outages, the platform instantly fails over to other optimal routes, thus ensuring availability of your applications. * With [downtime costs ]() rising every year, it is extremely important to maximize uptime to reduce impact on revenue and brand value. The Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform provides superior [business continuity]() in the event your data centers go down, by instantly failing over all the traffic to healthy data centers. All this is done seamlessly without impacting the customer experience. * Businesses are rapidly [adopting multiple cloud providers]() to capitalize on the unique benefits that each provider offers. At the same time modern applications utilize microservice architecture to achieve scalability, agility and reduce time to market. The Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform maximizes your cloud investment by seamlessly balancing traffic across any combination of data centers- both cloud based and on-premises. It boost performance of your modern applications and provides [scalability to meet traffic demands - both planned and unplanned.]() * Moving applications and workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud has its own challenges. The Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform eases the move to the cloud by enabling you to perform [canary releases to test out the new cloud infrastructure]() and allowing you to instantly fall back on your origin in case you encounter bugs or challenges. This not only reduces the cloud migration risk but also minimizes the impact on customer experience. Public cloud platforms offer many advantages, but it is challenging to move / and operate in the cloud. The differentiated digital experiences you create to win customers and get an edge over the competition will fall flat if you rely solely on public cloud platforms. Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform provides the scalability, availability, reliability and performance needed to deliver superior digital experiences and maximizes customer engagement and revenue. In part 2 of this blog series, we will share how Akamai Cloud Delivery Platform provides utmost security for your apps and infrastructure and protects you from the ever changing threat landscape. Stay Tuned! ![](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAkamaiBlog/~4/JivfQGAXFxk)

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