Defenders’ Guide 2025: Fortify the Future of Your Defense

This is not your average State of the Internet (SOTI) report. You may notice some fundamental differences between this one and our previous publications. That’s because this time we’re cutting through the noise to speak directly to the people on the front lines: the defenders.

We’ve brought together the multiple security research teams within Akamai to share their hard-earned, field-tested knowledge. Several groups of cybersecurity professionals are represented: researchers, operations professionals, product architects, data scientists, and incident responders.

Our goal is simple: To arm you with the real-world strategies you need to protect your systems in 2025’s increasingly complex digital battlefield. This report is packed with actionable insights from real cybersecurity experts who are battling threats every day. We’re giving you practical intelligence you can use right now.

In an effort to make this document useful for the entire security community, we have mapped our research findings to the security-in-depth framework, an expansion of the defense-in-depth methodology.