Case Study: U.S. Department of State achieves resilient, scalable web security and availability with Akamai Technologies

U.S. Department of State enhances security, stability and scalability to defend against continual attacks

The U.S. Department of State needed to maintain a secure, high-performing global web presence across hundreds of embassy and departmental sites in dozens of languages, while ensuring 24x7 availability and handling unpredictable traffic and malicious attacks. Managing security, scalability and performance in-house was complex and costly, so the agency sought a third‑party solution to protect its mission‑critical web properties.

The State Department adopted the Akamai Intelligent Platform—including Dynamic Site Accelerator, Web Application Firewall, Site Shield, DDoS Readiness, Enhanced DNS with DNSSEC, and NetStorage—to accelerate and protect its sites at the edge. Akamai helped detect and block attacks before they reached origin servers, absorb major DDoS waves (peaking at ~9,145 Mbps and ~1,921 Mbps), offload ~99% of origin bandwidth and nearly all static content, avoid significant hardware provisioning, and keep the agency’s sites resilient and performant.

U.S. Department of State

Peter Jarrell

Consultant , U.S. Department of State