The SaaS market is expected to grow by 196% from 2016 to 2020.1 As the SaaS market continues to swell and become an integral component of business infrastructure, security and performance remains top-of-mind for both SaaS providers and their customers. As this growth continues, SaaS providers will face increased competition in delivering the most secure and performant applications to customers. Underperforming applications and those vulnerable to attack will inevitably experience a negative impact on revenue, end-user engagement, brand reputation, and customer churn. Beyond availability, SaaS customers expect that the applications they purchase are protected by SSL encryption and served from their own custom domain—rather than that of their provider. But doing so requires either significant investment (and ongoing maintenance) in automating the certificate lifecycle, or implementation of costly manual procedures that place a burden on customers to acquire, renew, and securely upload private keys and certificates.
Cloudflare’s performance and security solution for SaaS providers protects and accelerates end customer experiences. Cloudflare’s globally load balanced content delivery network (CDN), combined with Argo smart routing, load balancing, and performance optimizations, can reduce visitor latency by 2x or more. Cloudflare’s 30 Tbps DDoS protection, combined with rate limiting and a web application firewall (WAF), mitigates both large volumetric attacks and complex attacks targeting layers 3, 4 and 7 of the OSI model. In addition, Cloudflare removes the burden of SSL lifecycle management for SaaS providers, facilitates serving their applications from the end-customers custom or vanity domain, and significantly improves performance over in-house solutions due to terminating SSL as physically close to web visitors as possible.
Secure Customer Data
Secure customer data across all domains with one-click, fully managed HTTPS.
Improved Application Performance
Can decrease loading times by 2x with Cloudflare’s web optimizations and content delivery network (CDN).
High Availability at Global Scale
Cloudflare’s network of 180 data centers across 80 countries ensures enterprise-grade availability.
API Compatible
Extend the performance and security benefits of Cloudflare to SaaS application APIs.
Amanda Kleha
GM, Zendesk Online Business Unit
Key Results
10x
improvement in global response time.
6x
improvement in targeted content delivery time by utilizing Cloudflare's cookie-based key caching.
Cloudflare’s SSL for SaaS offering allows SaaS providers to easily extend the security and performance benefits of Cloudflare’s network to customers’ custom or “vanity” hostnames. Enabling SSL brings additional trust to website and application visitors, improves customer SEO, and unlocks the modern HTTP/2 protocol, resulting in even greater speed improvements.
With a single API call, Cloudflare will provision individual SSL certificates for custom hostnames and be ready to serve traffic over HTTPS within just a few minutes. No action is required on the SaaS provider’s customers’ behalf, other than initially pointing their domain or subdomain in via CNAME. In addition, Cloudflare automatically handles certificate management and renewals—without any need to contact or involve the SaaS provider’s customers.
Cloudflare’s comprehensive security solution protects SaaS provider websites, applications, and APIs, while extending the benefits to end-customer Internet assets and their visitors. Cloudflare’s 30 Tbps global Anycast network is 15x bigger than the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, offering protection against attacks targeting layers 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model. Cloudflare absorbs traffic spikes and volumetric attacks, ensuring that unique customer assets, as well as neighboring customer assets served from a shared infrastructure, remain performant and available at all times. When combined with Rate Limiting and Web Application Firewall (WAF), Cloudflare’s security solution mitigates complex attacks targeting the application layer, protecting against distributed denial-of-service, brute-force login, and API endpoint abuse.
Cloudflare improves the end-user experience of SaaS provider websites, applications, and APIs by reducing latency and optimizing the performance of content delivery, while extending these benefits to end customer Internet assets. At the core of Cloudflare’s solution is a global content delivery network (CDN) of 180 data centers across 80 countries, bringing content closer to visitors of every region; additional CDN optimizations include auto-minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and Gzip compression, which save over 20% on the size of files and resources. Real-time network intelligence found in Argo’s smart routing finds the fastest paths available, routing around congestion and maintaining open, secure connections to eliminate latency imposed by connection-setup. For additional availability with reductions in latency, Cloudflare Load Balancing distributes traffic across multiple servers, routing it to the closest geographic region, while rapidly avoiding failures.
Cloudflare's Performance and Security Services work in conjunction to reduce latency of websites, mobile applications, and APIs end-to-end, while protecting against DDoS attack, abusive bots, and data breach.
Cloudflare Performance Services improve conversions, reduce churn, and improve visitor experiences by accelerating web and mobile performance, while keeping applications available.
Cloudflare Security Services reduce the risk of lost customers, declining revenues, and degraded brand by protecting against DDoS attacks, abusive bots, and data breach.