Your website needs a reliable layer of security if you want stakeholders and clients to trust your online processes. Billions of bytes of information pass through the internet every day, and if your company does not secure its data, anyone with the technical knowledge can sift for your data and use it for their own ends.
A network’s SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is vital in ensuring application security on your website. It protects traffic by providing authentication from the website to the client or vice versa. This encryption prevents data theft or loss, but it also needs much computer processing power.
This can put a strain on your web servers since these will also be performing other tasks. Ideally, you should be able to separate the processing that needs to be done during encryption from the traffic generated by people accessing your website. This is what SSL offloading does.
SSL uses an algorithm to secure the communication between your site and your clients. This acts as a trapdoor with two keys; one stored on the load server and another that is available to clients. The key is a way for clients to verify your site’s identity; legitimate public keys will ‘match’ their digital certificate with the private one stored on your site.
When you employ SSL offloading, your network does the encryption in a different space from the one occupied by the webserver. This can be a physically separate machine or a different processing device on the same hardware. With offloading, the process of encrypting and authentication will not affect your website’s performance.
Encryption takes a lot of power from a hardware’s central processing unit. If you’ve ever noticed your device slowing down when you check out an item or order food from an app, that’s the SSL process bogging the server down. It is a load balancer for your web traffic.
When you offload SSL, you will boost your website’s page loading times, this means that visitors will get a quicker response from you. More importantly, you keep your website stable and prevent system downtime. Offloading also means being able to automatically scale the activity of your servers to accommodate surges in traffic.
There are two types of SSL offloading used in network management. The first is SSL termination. In this process, data goes to a device that decrypts the information and forwards it to the webserver without a security later. This is a quick and efficient type of offloading.
The second type is SSL bridging, which conducts additional checks to screen for malware. Aside from decryption, there is also a scan for malicious code, after which, the data is encrypted again and sent to the webserver. This type is more geared toward security rather than alleviating the processing activities performed by a server.
Data security requires a lot of effort and financial investment. A company serious about keeping their web traffic secure should build the infrastructure for encrypting and authenticating data. SSL offloading ensures security while making server health monitoring more efficient.
For more application security and delivery solutions, get in touch with Resonate today. We provide traffic management solutions that earn our clients a quick return on investment. Get a free demo with us now!
There are nearly a dozen types of networks that are used to establish connections that…
Servers abound, this mission-critical hardware is a key driving force behind countless technologies ranging from…
Network failure can prove to be very costly or even downright disastrous for a business,…
A large segment of today’s technologies are server-reliant, from networks, to enterprise software systems, mobile…
Slow network performance can really hamper a company’s operations, while simultaneously resulting in a very…
Load balancers have the power to optimize speed and performance on a variety of different…