Performance, Security and Encryption for SaaS Providers
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.
Ready to optimize the performance and security of your SaaS offering?
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.
Easy SSL for Customer Domains
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.
Comprehensive SaaS Application Security
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.
Faster SaaS Application Experience
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.
Ready to optimize the performance and security of your SaaS offering?
Cloudflare Features
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.
Performance
Cloudflare Performance Services improve conversions, reduce churn, and improve visitor experiences by accelerating web and mobile performance, while keeping applications available.
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Content Delivery Network (CDN)
With 180 data centers across 80 countries, Cloudflare’s Anycast CDN caches static content at the edge, reducing latency by delivering assets as close as geographically possible to visitors. -
Website Optimizations
Cloudflare includes a suite of web optimizations to improve the performance of Internet assets. Optimizations include the latest web standards, such as HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, as well as proprietary enhancements for images and mobile device visitors. -
DNS
Cloudflare is the fastest managed DNS provider in the world, routing over 35% of all global DNS traffic. Cloudflare has multiple ways to achieve maximum performance for online assets. -
Load Balancing
Cloudflare Load Balancing provides load balancing, geo-steering, monitoring and failover for single, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud environments, enhancing performance and availability. -
Argo Smart Routing
Argo Smart Routing improves Internet asset performance on average of 30% by routing visitors through the least congested and most reliable paths on Cloudflare's private network. -
Railgun™
Railgun compresses previously unreachable web objects by leveraging techniques similar to those used in the compression of high-quality video. This can result in additional performance increase. -
Stream
Cloudflare Stream makes streaming high quality video at scale, easy and affordable. -
Workers
Cloudflare Workers let developers run JavaScript Service Workers in Cloudflare's 180 data centers around the world. -
Mobile SDK
Cloudflare’s Mobile SDK provides visibility into application performance and load times across any global carrier network.
Security
Cloudflare Security Services reduce the risk of lost customers, declining revenues, and degraded brand by protecting against DDoS attacks, abusive bots, and data breach.
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Anycast Network
With 180 data centers across 80 countries and 30 Tbps of capacity, Cloudflare’s Anycast network absorbs distributed attack traffic by dispersing it geographically, while keeping Internet properties available and performant. -
DNSSEC
DNSSEC is the Internet’s non-spoofable caller ID. It guarantees a web application’s traffic is safely routed to the correct servers so that a site’s visitors are not intercepted by a hidden “man-in-the-middle” attacker. -
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Cloudflare’s enterprise-grade web application firewall (WAF) detects and block common application layer vulnerabilities at the network edge, utilising the OWASP Top 10, application-specific and custom rulesets. -
Rate Limiting
Rate Limiting protects critical resources by providing fine-grained control to block or qualify visitors with suspicious request rates. -
SSL / TLS
Transport Security Layer (TLS) encryption enables HTTPS connections between visitors and origin server(s), preventing man-in-the-middle attacks, packet sniffing, the display of web browser trust warnings, and more. -
Secure Registrar
Cloudflare is an ICANN accredited registrar, protecting organizations from domain hijacking with high-touch, online and offline verification for any changes to a registrar account. -
Orbit
Cloudflare Orbit solves security-related issues for Internet of Things devices at the network level. -
Argo Tunnel
Cloudflare creates an encrypted tunnel between its nearest data center and an application’s origin server without opening a public inbound port. -
Access
Secure, authenticate, and monitor user access to any domain, application, or path on Cloudflare. -
Spectrum
Spectrum protects TCP applications and ports from volumetric DDoS attacks and data theft by proxying non-web traffic through Cloudflare’s Anycast network.
