Teleworking, online education, telemedicine, and online purchases are only some of the phenomena that exponentially grew since the beginning of the pandemic. They all present a common challenge: the increasing importance of counting on safe and high-performance web portals to secure a good experience for users and safeguard company’s and customers’ sensitive information.
To that end, Lumen provides 360o focus, aimed at accelerating and securing three web experience issues: performance, security, and availability.
Regarding performance, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) bring content to the edge, closer to where users need it, increase bandwidth and overall efficiency. Unlike privately owned data centers, which may be undersized at times of high demand and have idle costs during regular periods, a CDN allows you to adjust scale as business dynamically changes. Furthermore, it counts on optimization tools to smartly orchestrate, route, and provide content. CDNs are estimated to contribute with 80% of the requests made to a portal and they use the caching process, which means they generate replicas of content at the edge, extremely close to the end user. Estimates also show that they multiply a portal’s capacity by 50 when compared to traditional models. Another benefit is providing inherent DDoS protection, resulting in better performance.
From a security point of view, the above-mentioned DDoS protection must be combined with strategies that can avoid and restrain a growing set of threats, with more layers and greater sophistication: web application firewalls, safe API connections (apps that can be used by attackers), and protection against bots. The last two are key; according to Lumen data, 52% of portal accesses are made by robots, instead of humans. Most of them show malicious intent and containing them is crucial.
Lastly, in terms of availability, our objective is to reach a perfect balance of workloads, to avoid performance issues, and to work on links which forecast any type of contingency, ensuring business continuity under all circumstances.
“Web portals are critical to the activities of organizations and efforts to implement these three focal points – performance, security, and availability – at the highest possible level, are equally critical”, commented Ricardo Pulgarín, security solution regional architect for Lumen LATAM.
