Page loading time is a critical element of any website application. As more websites become globally distributed load time has become increasingly important to user experience, brand perception, and search engine optimization. As important as page loading time is to the development and marketing team behind a web application, so is the security to the infoSec team tasked with preventing cybercriminals from gaining unauthorized access to web systems.

Keeping these two priorities at odds are the various tools that each team must use to keep their piece of the application up-to-date. Load balancing tools are often used to assist with page loading time and website performance but offer little-to-no real security. While conventional web application firewalls can take days, if not weeks, to update when any change is made to a website.

With Protector-Air web application security architecture website performance and security are no longer mutually exclusive. Development, marketing, and security teams now have one tool that combines enterprise-grade security and optimizes response times and performance.

How it works

When a web page is loaded the browser requests its resources from the server in their order of appearance. A web page loading process can contain as many as 100 requests. Each request takes several milliseconds to make the round trip from the browser to the server and back. During the round trip, additional latency is introduced by back-end processing: load balancers, HTTP servers, cache servers, Content Management Systems (CMS), Web Application Firewalls, databases, and multiple other serving and security layers slow down response. The CMS generates the HTML page dynamically and it is served to the user. This sequence of events accumulates to thousands of milliseconds and impacts user experience.