Applications are central to the growth of any business. Ensuring ultra-fast web experiences while securing your websites and mobile apps and protecting your end-users cost-effectively will help your business stays productive. In the past, when it comes to an application’s performance and security, organizations have been forced to compromise one for the other; a solution where performance and security go hand-in-hand was either unavailable or was too expensive, especially for rapidly-growing organizations or those on a budget. A decade ago, it was easy enough to get away with this: the end-users were not used to instant Internet accessibility (as they are today), and the threat landscape was utterly different from what we see now.

Today, when it comes to application performance, organizations want to deliver fast web experiences, starting with reducing latency and improving the end-user experience by caching content on servers geographically closest to their end-users. To ensure their business-critical applications are performant, they must deliver traffic via the quickest and most reliable routes, distribute traffic across servers, and deliver images and live and on-demand videos quickly. And considering applications remain as important as ever for enterprises, they’ll continue to remain a  priority target for attackers–and even small organizations can be targeted, and a successful attack can disrupt the normal course of business. Applications are at risk of familiar attacks such as DDoS attacks, cross-site scripting attacks, or old vulnerability exploits. And attack surfaces continue to increase; as a result, organizations need to be swift in blocking emerging vulnerability exploits, credential stuffing, bots that hoard inventory or scrap prices, and risks from compromised third-party tools.

To keep up with these changing dynamics, organizations are moving towards an integrated application solution that can do all the above. Cost-effectively integrating performance and security offerings to ensure applications are not only highly performant but also secure is the path forward. It is time to put the outdated notion of compromising one for the other to rest.