Laura Howell

Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer Akamai Technologies

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Laura Howell is Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer of Akamai Technologies, the Cambridge, Massachusetts company that operates one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms, spanning content delivery, cybersecurity and cloud computing. The chief accounting officer’s job at a company like Akamai is less visible than the CFO’s and in some respects harder: it is the role that has to produce correct numbers for a business that bills across almost every country on earth, holds servers in thousands of networks, and has grown substantially by acquisition. Howell leads the global team responsible for external financial reporting, accounting, tax, payroll and equity administration, and has supported the company through acquisitions, debt offerings and successive changes to accounting standards. She is an internal appointment in the fullest sense, having joined Akamai’s finance organisation in 2013 in SEC reporting and technical accounting and worked up through Corporate Controller and Vice President of Corporate Finance to her present role.

Career Highlights

• Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer of Akamai Technologies, and a Section 16 officer of the company.
• Leads the global team responsible for external financial reporting, accounting, tax, payroll and equity administration.
• Joined Akamai in 2013 and progressed through SEC reporting and technical accounting, Corporate Controller and Vice President of Corporate Finance to Chief Accounting Officer.
• Supported acquisitions, debt offerings and the implementation of new accounting standards during her Akamai tenure.
• Spent nearly ten years at Deloitte auditing technology-sector clients, from multinational corporations to startups, including initial public offering support work.
• Held SEC reporting and technical accounting roles at Progress Software.
• Has held an active Massachusetts Certified Public Accountant licence for more than 20 years.
• Based at Akamai’s Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters.

Professional Journey

Howell took both her degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration followed by a Master of Science in Accounting, and qualified as a Certified Public Accountant in Massachusetts — a licence she has now held for more than two decades.

She spent close to ten years at Deloitte, auditing technology-sector clients that ranged from multinational corporations to early-stage startups, and including work supporting companies through initial public offerings. Audit work of that kind is the standard route into technical accounting leadership: it exposes a practitioner to a wide range of accounting treatments quickly, and IPO support in particular forces a grasp of SEC reporting requirements before anyone has to apply them from the inside. She also held SEC reporting and technical accounting roles at Progress Software, another Massachusetts enterprise software company.

She joined Akamai in 2013 in SEC reporting and technical accounting, the function that prepares a public company’s quarterly and annual filings and decides how novel transactions are accounted for. From there she became Corporate Controller, owning the accounting organisation itself, and then Vice President of Corporate Finance, widening her remit beyond reporting.

As Chief Accounting Officer she runs the full accounting, tax, payroll and equity administration function globally. The period of her tenure has been an unusually active one for Akamai’s finance organisation: the company has made a series of acquisitions as it expanded from content delivery into security and then into cloud computing, has raised convertible debt, and has had to implement successive new accounting standards. She continues to file Section 16 reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an Akamai officer, most recently in September 2026.

Education

University of New Hampshire

Master of Science, Accounting

University of New Hampshire

Bachelor of Science, Business Administration