Better Security, Greater Experiences

ISL - Akamai

Edge Security Without Disrupting CX

Background

In just about 20 years, Black Hat Annual Security Conference in Las Vegas has become the leading vendor-neural environment to address the needs of the security community. So when Akamai decided to exhibit its intelligent edge platform to educate the best minds and professionals in the industry, they thought about how to engage with the audience with an influential interactive 3D visualization. The challenge, however, was to build a powerful experience for users to understand cyber-security in multi-cloud applications and how to deliver scalable, resilient solutions for persistent attacks without diminish the experience of legitimate users at the edge.

Effortless Interface Design

Akamai wanted to share how its latest cloud-based security suit protects the most valuable brands without disrupting user experiences. The concept, envisioned by ISL, was to create a three-dimensional node world to allow users to navigate through various attacks and activate malicious nodes to elicit a response from the security tools.

TheIncLab team designed and engineered a real-time rendering world with key nodes built out of thousands of vertices to play as the actors of cyber-attacks while dynamically morphing nodes symbolized malicious bots. The interaction design concept was to allow visitors to effortlessly immerse in the cyber-world. In the words of Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC chief scientist and father of ubiquitous computing, “a good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, we mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool.” A physics engine displayed the notes attributes, the recurrence and the response triggered from attacker nodes. Users were able to interact with gestures driven by a time of flight camera and a custom mechanical input to navigate the node world.