In the wake of the record-breaking botnet attack that hit one of its highest profile users last month, it’s no surprise that Akamai Technology Inc. is doubling down on security.

The content delivery giant this morning picked up a Sunnyvale, CA-based startup called Soha Systems Inc. that has developed a service for regulating external access to corporate networks. The tool lets companies open up their internal applications to contractors, suppliers and other third parties without having to deploy any special hardware or requiring users to download a client.

As a matter of fact, Soha Systems says it doesn’t even employ a tunneling protocol like traditional VPN software, which means there are less moving pieces for hackers to try and exploit. The service instead transmits traffic via a direct TLS connection protected by AES256 that goes straight to the target workload.

On the backend, Soha Systems provides a management console that enables administrators to closely regulate the incoming traffic. They can restrict users to accessing only the applications that they need for their work, require multifactor authentication and even integrate with external access control products for an extra level of protection. Soha Systems’ service also supports popular content delivery networks like Akamai’s, which should make the acquisition go fairly smoothly from a technical standpoint.

The service will complement the company’s Client Reputation tool for blocking traffic from untrusted IP addresses, the Prolexic application proxy and the other offerings in its Cloud Security Solutions portfolio. Akamai is likely planning to expand the integration between Soha Systems’ technology and products products to help customers take better advantage of the offering. The company is looking to make the service’s capabilities available to users sometime by the end of the year.

As with Akamai’s acquisition of Concord Systems Inc. last month, the financial terms of the term were not disclosed. However, the fact that Soha Systems has raised nearly $10 million from private investors suggests that the purchase price is likely in the eight-figure range.

Image via  Pixabay