FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Solutions

Can Webscale host my application for me?

Yes, all of Webscale’s solutions come with the ability, either by default or as an add-on option, to host your application in our cloud account. Hosting your application lets you focus on managing the functional aspects of your application, rather than managing the infrastructure. Read about our product plans here.

How do Webscale solutions differ from traditional appliances like ADC or WAF?

Historically, ADC (Application Delivery Controller) or WAF (Web Application Firewall) functionality was available from many industry vendors as a hardware appliance. These have since evolved into software solutions that one can deploy on virtual machines. The common theme here is that they leave the management of complex infrastructure to the customer. We deliver Webscale as a pure SaaS (Software as a Service), so you do not have to worry about procuring, deploying, or maintaining the ADC or WAF. The software is cloud-hosted and managed by Webscale through its multi-tenant architecture, delivering all the functionality needed, including auto-updates, so new functionality is immediately available without any intervention on your part.

How can Webscale protect my application from developer errors?

It is not uncommon for developer errors to bring down applications. Webscale can automatically take scheduled (time-based or event-based) backups of the entire application and validate each backup to make sure they are usable for restoration to a fully functional application. When an application goes down due to erroneous code changes, the safest recovery option is to restore from a previously validated backup. Webscale enables the administrator to choose from a list of validated backups and restore the application successfully, preventing further downtime.

How can Webscale protect my application against cloud outages?

While not very common, wide-scale cloud outages may occur. Such disasters can have a significant impact on the revenue and brand reputation of the business. Webscale has disaster recovery solutions (Cloud Mirror and Cloud Rescue) that can replicate a running application in a different cloud region or an entirely different cloud provider, ensuring there is a redundant, near real-time snapshot of the application always available during a cloud outage. During the disaster, Webscale can then failover the application to the replica location and have the application running back up with its last known available state.

Features

What is Webscale Shield Mode?

Often, we see applications facing DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks from bots, slowing the application down and keeping it from responding to other valid requests or bringing it down altogether. To get ahead of this problem, the admin can enable Webscale Shield with a single click. Webscale Shield locks all bots out of the application instantly and validates users to only allow humans. This buys the administrators time to identify the pattern causing the attack and permanently block them before disabling the Webscale Shield.

What is App Shield?

The Webscale data plane includes a WAF (web application firewall) that fronts the application. Through various control mechanisms (blacklisting, Web Controls, DDoS Shield Mode, WAF rules), Webscale can block bad traffic before it gets to the application. But, if an attacker discovers the application server IP addresses, they can bypass the Webscale WAF and directly access the application servers to attack them. To solve this security problem, the Webscale App Shield, when enabled, only allows web requests to the application servers coming from the Webscale data plane IPs and rejects all other requests. This ensures the only valid traffic getting through to the application comes via the Webscale data plane, and there is one place to apply all security controls to that traffic.

What are Web Controls, and how do I use them?

Web Controls are easy-to-use, customizable policies enforced on web requests accessing the application. They are used to control different aspects of web traffic – to tune and enhance performance, uptime, and security of the web application. The administrator can configure and enable multiple web controls and determine their execution order through the Webscale control panel. Some of the many use cases you can enable through web controls:

  • Block (or allow) user traffic from a particular geography.
  • Enable blue-green testing of different web application designs.
  • Enable performance optimizations based on specific request identifiers such as URLs.
  • Route application admin page requests to a separate application backend.
  • Optimize 3rd party content to speed up page load.

See the Web Controls How-Tos for instructions on configuring Web Controls.

What is Dynamic Site Cache?

Web pages are increasingly personalized and dynamic, and therefore are un-cacheable since they change dynamically based on whether a user is logged in. Enabling Dynamic Site Cache allows caching of web pages outside the application infrastructure for users who are not logged in, from within the Webscale data plane. This significantly offloads the application to focus on checkouts and cart operations and leaves generic browsing and bot activity to be handled outside the infrastructure, leading to faster page load performance and increased cost efficiency of hosting. You can enable Dynamic Site Cache on a per-application basis.

What is Bot IP Shield? How do I get it?

Webscale Bot IP Shield addresses the challenge of identifying known bad attackers through incoming IP addresses. Bot IP Shield disables, in real-time, inbound communications from IPs known to be malicious, keeping customer infrastructure secure and efficient. Webroot’s BrightCloud® IP Reputation Service powers Webscale Bot IP Shield. Bot IP Shield is available as part of Cloud Bot Manager or Enterprise Cloud Secure.

What is Cloud Bot Manager? How is it offered?

Cloud Bot Manager is Webscale’s comprehensive multi-cloud bot management solution that combats the rapidly growing threat of malicious bots while improving performance and delivering higher RoI. It includes:

  • Instant Attack Detection
  • Real-Time Bot Mitigation
  • Bot IP Directory
  • Real-Time Monitoring, Reporting and Management
  • Intelligent Caching Cloud Bot Manager can be enabled with just DNS changes to protect any application on any hosted environment. It is also available as part of Enterprise Cloud Secure, Webscale’s enterprise security suite. Learn more on Webscale Cloud Bot Manager.

Pricing

What is the pricing model for Webscale solutions?

Webscale plans are priced like any SaaS, with monthly recurring fees and sometimes, a one-time setup fee. The plan that you choose depends on various factors relating to your needs. The need for Webscale hosting, the number of web applications that need to be managed by Webscale, the average number of visitors to each web application, and other considerations are all factors to consider.

Have questions not answered here? Please Contact Support to get more help.


Last modified April 6, 2020