Increasing the security and performance of web applications with Cloudflare and Safetech
Massive migration of applications to the cloud is a dominant trend globally, with Gartner estimating that by 2025, 95% of newly launched applications and services will run natively from the cloud. However, this reality generates multiple challenges both in terms of security and performance assurance.
According to the 2024 edition of the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, web applications remain at the top of attack vectors, with a 40% share of breaches, similar to email. In fact, data published in 2023 by Akamai shows that the volume of attacks targeting web and API applications has increased 2.5 times in the last two years, the causes being accelerated adoption in the business environment and the large number of vulnerabilities present in these applications.
The recent incident through which 4 million invoices with the data of about 1.8 million customers were exposed by a Romanian online invoicing application is a confirmation of the two aforementioned investigations. However, this breach remains minor compared to the incidents that occurred at Yahoo in 2016, when the data of more than 600 million users was stolen, or from Uber in 2022, when a teenage hacker took control of cloud infrastructure and development environments.
It is not only security that is a challenge for organizations that rely on web applications, but also ensuring their performance. Contemporary users demand websites, web apps, and APIs that load instantly and are never offline. Factors that affect web application performance include network latency, web server response time, code quality, caching, and content delivery.
In 2024, the American agency Portent conducted a research that involved analyzing 27,000 pages of e-commerce platforms for 30 days. The results showed that B2B pages that loaded in no more than one second had 3x higher conversion rates than those that loaded in five seconds. Similarly, the low performance or lack of availability of a web application generates significant costs, depending on the nature of the application, but especially dissatisfaction among users and its abandonment (88% of users would give up on a mobile application if it had interruptions and bugs).
Secure and high-performance web applications with Cloudflare
Recognized by Gartner as a “Representative Vendor” in the 2023 edition of the “Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Web Application and API Protection”, Cloudflare, a company with which Safetech Innovations has a partnership relationship, is a leading provider of cloud-based services that increase the security, performance, and reliability of websites and applications of the internet. The company operates a global network of data centers strategically located across the world, enabling it to deliver content and mitigate online threats closer to end users.
One of Cloudflare’s core offerings is the Content Delivery Network (CDN), an advanced content delivery solution that optimizes website performance and security through a global network of servers spanning 320 locations. By optimizing site content, caching it, and delivering it from servers geographically located closer to end users, Cloudflare’s CDN reduces latency and improves site loading speed.
Cloudflare Services to Increase Web Application Security
- DDoS protection: With a network capacity of 280 Tbps, Cloudflare mitigates the largest DDoS attacks without slowing down the performance of recipients’ applications. DDoS mitigation is done from the closest location to the beneficiary, without sending traffic to distant data centers. Cloudflare DDoS protects web applications, TCP/UDP applications, networks, and data centers alike at the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) 3, 4, and 7 level.
- Bot protection: Cloudflare’s network processes more than 25 million HTTP requests per second, with the data being used to train machine learning, behavioral analysis, and fingerprinting algorithms. Cloudflare Bot Management allows you to manage bots in real-time, with speed and accuracy, and stop them from performing various malicious activities. This will give security teams time to focus on other projects. Complementary, the user experience is improved by avoiding CAPTCHAs.
- Web Application Firewall: Cloudflare WAF provides full security visibility, provides layered protection against OWASP attacks and emerging exploits, detects evasions and new attacks with machine learning, stops a wide range of attacks in real-time using a powerful ruleset, blocks account takeovers and performs credential exposure checks, detects data loss, scans uploaded content, and more, easily fitting into the company’s broader security workflows. Cloudflare’s API security and bot protection services are also fully integrated with WAF, calling on the same powerful rules engine, delivered by one of the world’s most connected global cloud platforms.
- Threat Intelligence through Cloudforce One: Cloudflare processes an average of 35 million DNS queries per second, providing a complete view of today’s threats. Cloudflare’s global network, is used as a “reverse proxy” by almost 20% of all websites. This allows organizations to incorporate complex threat intelligence (STIX/TAXII feeds) into security tools. In addition, Cloudforce One accelerates security investigations to obtain contextual information about IPs, domains, ASNs, URLs.
- Website API security via Cloudflare API Gateway: Using Cloudflare’s global network, API Gateway automatically discovers, validates, and protects API endpoints using machine learning models and heuristics. The solution blocks common attacks on APIs, including zero-day vulnerabilities, credential abuse, DDoS, and directs only secure traffic to the API.
Ensuring optimal performance with Clouflare services
- Increase the performance of applications accessed via internet: The essential element of this process is the Cloudflare CDN (Content Delivery Network), an advanced content delivery solution that optimizes the performance and security of websites through a global network of servers, with 320 locations. Cloudflare CDN optimizes static and dynamic content for devices, browsers, and bandwidth needs. For faster apps and user experience, CDN delivers content as close to end users as possible, in about 50 milliseconds, resulting in faster loading times and an optimal web experience. The solution reduces hosting costs by reducing the number of requests to the origin server and minimizing bandwidth usage.
- Availability Assurance/Downtime Limitation: Cloudflare improves the availability of applications impacted by overloaded or unavailable infrastructure by monitoring network latency and server health at origin, identifying the best resource from which to serve user requests for dynamic content. Cloudflare Anycast’s global network spans 120 countries, providing a backbone of scalable infrastructure that prevents downtime and downtime.
- Improvement of the web experience: Cloudflare’s application delivery services bring organizations’ websites milliseconds away from almost any internet user. Cloudflare allows for quick diagnosis of UX issues, caching optimization, and speeding up dynamic content delivery. Cloudflare Browser Insights allows you to measure performance metrics from the perspective of visitors around the world.
Safetech Services Associated with Cloudflare
Safetech Innovations has a long-term partnership relationship with Cloudflare, providing professional integration services to customers, for quickly achieving optimal results by using Cloudflare solutions. Safetech’s services include:
- DNS configuration (migration of DNS records from the existing server to Cloudflare),
- WAF configuration,
- Bot protection configuration,
- DDoS override configuration,
- Generation of custom reports.
Benefits of using Cloudflare services provided by Safetech
The Cloudflare services provided by Safetech directly contribute to increasing the security and performance of web applications and the return on investment in Cloudflare products. By using Cloudflare services provided by Safetech, you:
- Protect your web applications and APIs from zero-day vulnerabilities,
- Mitigate DDoS attacks, regardless of their size,
- Optimize the delivery of web content to users,
- Limit the effects of latency and improve the overall performance of web applications and APIs,
- Distribute traffic associated with web applications through load balancing to optimize performance.
With Safetech Innovations and Cloudflare, online security and performance can be turned into a strategic asset for any organization.
To benefit from the Safetech team’s expertise in setting up and using Cloudflare solutions effectively, contact us at sales @ safetech.ro or phone +40 21 316 0565.
