Transforming Security with Akamai WAAP & RiverSafe Expertise

by Jamiu Akande

Overview 

As one of the UK’s best-known retailers, our customer faced relentless web and API attacks, putting customer data, revenue, and brand trust at risk.

To strengthen their defences, they invested in Akamai WAAP, a widely adopted web and API protection platform that quickly became a cornerstone of their security strategy. But like any powerful technology, it required ongoing expertise and fine-tuning to deliver its full potential.

Without that focus, false positives slowed releases, security policies became outdated, and the platform wasn’t optimised to defend against today’s evolving threats. This created friction between the development and security teams. Yet Akamai remained a critical part of their defence strategy, providing some of the strongest protections available in the market.

The challenge wasn’t the platform, it was ensuring it was continuously optimised and aligned to business needs. That’s when they turned to RiverSafe. They needed a partner to unlock the full value of their Akamai investment, managing, optimising, and evolving the platform, without the cost and risk of building specialist expertise in-house.

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Launch Video

RiverSafe Akamai WAAP Services 

Rather than a one-off project, RiverSafe took full ownership of the customers Akamai WAAP environment through our managed service offering. This provided the customer with ongoing expertise, optimisation, and hands-on management to ensure the platform not only keeps pace with the business but actively enables it.

We focus on three areas: 

  • Optimisation and standardisation

    We continuously streamline and update policies to align with best practices. This reduces complexity, strengthens security, and makes the platform easier to manage.

  • Tailored protection

    Every month brings new threats and new business needs. We design custom rules, implement advanced bot management, and fine-tune defences against the OWASP Top 10 to address both security risks and operational requirements.

  • Business enablement

    Our team works directly with developers and other business units, removing friction, speeding up change requests, and ensuring WAAP supports rather than slows innovation. Whether onboarding APIs, allowing partner integrations, or enabling SEO bots, we make security seamless.

The Results 

RiverSafe’s Akamai service continues to deliver improvements across the business: 

  • Security posture – defences grow stronger with every optimisation cycle. Continuous tuning means new threats are addressed quickly, giving the business confidence that its e-commerce platform is always protected. 
  • Developer productivity – false positives have been drastically reduced, and developers now have a trusted team they can turn to for fast changes. Releases are smoother, and friction with security continues to decline. 
  • Operational efficiency – support tickets and manual interventions are decreasing, as WAAP policies are standardised and embedded into business workflows. 
  • Business confidence – teams have renewed trust in Akamai. Instead of being seen as a blocker, the platform is now viewed as a core enabler of secure digital services. 

Why RiverSafe?

Continuity of expertise 

Embedded in a service, avoiding costly training and the risk that comes from single points of failure. 

Rapid response and support 

With experts on hand to solve developer and business challenges quickly. 

Long-term value

Ensuring Akamai adapts with the business, threat landscape, and technology changes. 

By transforming their Akamai WAAP deployment with RiverSafe’s expertise, this retailer turned a once underperforming platform into a business enabler, strengthening security, empowering developers, and ensuring e-commerce resilience.

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