Beyond the Rack Chooses Akamai to Safeguard its Site; Deliver Scale and Performance

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere, today announced that Beyond the Rack has implemented multiple Akamai solutions to help safeguard its retail site and customer information from malicious attacks, while maintaining high levels of scale and performance.

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Beyond the Rack, North America's premier online shopping club, offers its members the most sought-after designer brand apparel, accessories, beauty, consumer electronics, and home decor products at prices up to 80% off retail.  Ranked by Internet Retailer as North America's fastest-growing e-tailer in 2011, Beyond the Rack sells its products via limited-time, limited-quantity sales events.  Every day, Beyond the Rack sends an email notification to its members about the newest, most exclusive sales events.  The vast majority of flash sales start at 11a.m. ET and, due to limited availability and high demand for the exclusive offerings, the company typically processes most of its sales within the first hour or two following the commencement of the sale. 

According to Ted Guglielmi, Chief Technology Officer of Beyond the Rack, its retail site fields about 25% of total traffic for the day during the first two-hour window.  The ability to tap into on-demand scalability, as well as the need to address performance, security, and costs was top of mind for Beyond the Rack, particularly as it anticipated further aggressive growth.  In order to address its range of needs, Beyond the Rack evaluated a few providers but decided the Akamai Aqua Web Solutions and Kona Security Solutions were the best options for the company.

Beyond the Rack is seeing growing amounts of traffic from countries outside of North America, including those countries that are sometimes associated with attack traffic.  "With Akamai Web Application Firewall, part of Akamai's Kona Security Solutions, we gain added protection against denial-of-service attacks and can filter out bad traffic, without impacting the performance of our site," said Guglielmi.  "And because the costs associated with downtime are significant and immediate, being proactive about mitigating downtime helps us avoid lost revenues."

In addition, with 50% of Beyond the Rack's catalog changing every day, the company needed a solution designed to ensure rapidly changing product availability and content were immediately available to site visitors.  Since implementing Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator, part of Akamai's Aqua Web Solutions, Beyond the Rack confirmed it has experienced a roughly 20% improvement in site load and page render times during peak periods.  Leveraging Akamai, Beyond the Rack has stated that it has also reduced its bandwidth costs while improving overall site performance and dramatically growing its business.

"Beyond the Rack is an excellent example of a company who had little time to evolve their technology and infrastructure," said Lelah Manz, Chief Strategist of eCommerce, Akamai.  "As a flash sale site, the e-tailer has to face the challenges of peak traffic every single day.  Beyond the Rack found it critical to have the ability to achieve near infinite scale and best-in-class performance while securing the site from attacks.  By leveraging Akamai solutions, Beyond the Rack believes it has achieved its goals and now can provide a better and more secure shopping experience for its customers."

About Beyond the Rack

Beyond the Rack, North America's premier online shopping club, offers its members the most sought-after designer brand apparel, accessories, beauty, and home decor products at up to 80% off retail. Ranked by Internet Retailer's Top 500 Guide as North America's fastest-growing e-tailer in 2011, Beyond the Rack sells its products in the context of two-day, first-come, first-served, limited-quantity events. Members can expect up to 15 new events each day, starting at 11AM ET. The privately held company has offices in Montreal, New York and Las Vegas, with a staff of 360 full-time employees. Beyond the Rack proudly serves 8 million members across North America.

About Akamai

Akamai® is the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere. At the core of the Company's solutions is the Akamai Intelligent Platform™ providing extensive reach, coupled with unmatched reliability, security, visibility and expertise. Akamai removes the complexities of connecting the increasingly mobile world, supporting 24/7 consumer demand, and enabling enterprises to securely leverage the cloud. To learn more about how Akamai is accelerating the pace of innovation in a hyperconnected world, please visit www.akamai.com or blogs.akamai.com, and follow @Akamai on Twitter.

Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act

This release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai's management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the effects of any attempts to intentionally disrupt our services or network by hackers or others, failure of Akamai services to operate as expected, unexpected termination of Akamai's relationship with Beyond the Rack, a failure of Akamai's network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in Akamai's Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.

SOURCE Akamai Technologies, Inc.