Today’s online users have built-up certain standards of quality when visiting a website. They expect a high performance website with fast page load times and easily accessible, fresh and dynamic content. They also expect to enjoy a seamless and secure experience without downtime or limitations to content access. As for website managers, they strive to provide the most enjoyable digital user experience for their customers by offering fast response times and strong performance from their website even in times of high volumes of traffic and when under security attack.
To achieve this, websites need to be scalable and resilient. They need to be equipped to cope when things go wrong, in the case of a DDoS or bot attack, or when things go well and they experience a sudden surge in traffic to a website.
‘Resilience’ is the ability to ‘bounce back’ quickly from a crisis, or, as the Oxford Dictionary defines it, “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties” or “the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity”.
For website managers a robust content delivery network (CDN) provides that elasticity for their site to ensure the levels of availability, speed and performance that customers have come to expect no matter the circumstances.
Content Delivery Network for faster response times
A content-distribution network (CDN) is a network of data centers which work together as a single service that provides performance benefits to both application users and operations alike. Benefits include faster and more consistent response times typically accomplished by concurrently serving content out of local data centers with a closer physical proximity to end users than the server of origin, thus cutting down on transit time and distance.
Imperva’s CDN offers advanced content caching, load balancing and custom rules capabilities all within a secure single-stack Web Application and API Security (WAAP) platform to ensure content on our customers’ websites and applications is delivered securely and consistently around the world.
Super fast and efficient access to dynamic web content
Imperva CDN uses advanced caching techniques to accelerate site speed and improve the customer experience. Intelligent caching functionality such as Smart cache leverages machine learning to efficiently cache dynamically-generated pages by tracking content usage patterns and auto optimizing storage and delivery. Benefits of Smart Cache include cache adjustment for regionally popular content and automated cache rules for frequently accessed materials. And there are savings to be made, too. Automatic caching for frequently used content reduces costs by lowering bandwidth usage.
Distribution and scalability across a global network
Load balancing offers greater operational efficiency to your application delivery by distributing user requests across origin data centers and servers to achieve the best performance and response times. In addition, it helps to ensure site availability in the case of a malfunctioning server or data center by routing traffic to a healthy server. Imperva uses advanced load balancing algorithms to make sure requests are always routed to the origin server with the smallest load. This keeps the load evenly distributed across the origin servers to improve performance and enable scalability. The Imperva Load Balancer also plays a major role in Disaster Recovery planning acting as an automated solution for site failover. When selecting a load balancing solution it is important to evaluate which is the best fit for your infrastructure, availability and growth strategy.
Improve site speed and manage traffic during peak times
Other Imperva CDN benefits include Content Optimization, such as minification and compression, to improve page load times and increase site speed while the Imperva Waiting Room helps you better manage traffic to your website during peak times by enabling you to place them in a virtual queueing system for access to your site. Waiting Room prevents sites from going offline and keeps your customers on your site ultimately resulting in higher conversion for transactional or retail sites.
Built within a WAAP platform resilience
Of course the Imperva CDN is built within our single-stack WAAP platform which reinforces site resilience by combining WAF and API Security, DDoS Protection and Bot protection all in one comprehensive platform. Websites are protected from the latest security threats avoiding costly downtime and recovery time as a result of cyber security attacks aimed at overwhelming the application such as a DDoS or Bot attack.
Custom rules for speed and security of delivery
With security in mind, one of the key features of our CDN is our Custom Rules Engine which offers self-service rules customization to allow you to quickly adapt to the needs of your environment and make fast decisions based on visit and request attributes without changing the user-facing URL. The rules engine offers capabilities such as ResponseHeaderOverride which not only provides faster response times but also offers a real boost to your website security by protecting it from vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting and Clickjacking.
Ultimately the CDN that you choose will be the driving force behind your website giving you precision control over your site performance, speed, and resilience that your customers have grown to expect.
Read more about Imperva Application Performance.
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