Case Study: Gemological Institute of America achieves 130% faster global website performance and enhanced security with Akamai Technologies

Gemological Institute of America Improves Performance and Protects its Global Website Using Akamai’s Solutions

The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) is a nonprofit authority on diamonds, colored stones, and pearls that provides education, research and independent grading to consumers and the jewelry trade worldwide. Its content-rich site (more than 16,000 pages, 20,000+ images, videos, four languages and about 2 million page views per month) needed better global performance—especially in Asia and China—and stronger protection for critical services like its Report Check page against DoS attacks and data-mining.

GIA deployed Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator Secure and Kona Site Defender with professional services to speed delivery and harden security. The results: global site performance improved (130% worldwide, 330% in North America; 89% in China by a third-party test), Akamai offloaded 79% of hits, the site now supports roughly 4× the traffic with minimal infrastructure growth, and the Web Application Firewall blocked over 214,000 malicious requests in one month while preventing bandwidth-draining data mining and improving availability.

Gemological Institute of America

Vivianne Del Signore

Director of Digital Communications