Level-Up Your Content and Application Delivery With Lumen

For years, companies have used content delivery networks (CDNs) to deliver content as close to their users as possible. This is becoming more challenging. The pandemic has accelerated remote access and spiked both traffic volumes and security threats. The CDN must become more responsive, resilient, and reconfigurable.

Lumen operates a next-generation edge application delivery solution built for the cloud and designed for integrated application delivery, performance and security. We recently met online with IT decision makers to explain how our cloud-first, virtualized infrastructure is taking traditional CDNs to a whole new level.

Modern CDNs deliver more than just content to users; they deliver applications. But their legacy points of presence and equipment were rigid and hard to reconfigure, making it difficult to manage that application logic. The evolution of DevOps, which fused application development and operations exacerbated that problem.

The Lumen software-defined application delivery and performance platform virtualizes all layers of the technology stack, giving it several advantages over traditional CDNs.

It was built for the cloud, with support for cloud infrastructures including the Google Cloud platform, Azure, Amazon Web Services and our own Lumen platform, among many others. That means it can scale to satisfy any workload, anywhere. It’s also an obvious choice if you’re moving to cloud-native infrastructure or if you’re expanding into a multi-cloud environment.

Software-defined infrastructure also makes Lumen points of presence (POPs) dynamic. As virtualized instances, they can be spun up in any location and in any quantity, as needed.

Lumen also gives developers direct access to configuration files, which empowers them to interact with applications on the platform just as they interact with their other cloud applications, integrating software directly into their continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines.

This flexibility extends into modular architecture. Lumen users can choose what functionality they want for their environment, with options including caching, bot mitigation, web application firewall (WAF), image optimization and more. They can even bring their own applications. Developers can deploy these workloads as container-based microservices and go beyond mere API-based access to interact with them by checking out the local POP’s code as a Git repository.

Taking an advanced approach to security

This flexibility enables companies to choose the right infrastructure applications for their use case. Many are struggling to meet their security goals with legacy web application firewalls. Web traffic has evolved beyond the capabilities of legacy web application firewalls. According to Gartner, by 2021 90% of web-enabled applications will expose more of their attack surface via exposed APIs than the UI, up from 40% in 2019. This will help stoke a wave of API abuse, making this the most frequent attack vector by 2022, the company has warned.

Wallarm is a good example of a cloud-native infrastructure application available as part of Lumen’s trusted third-party ecosystem. It is a cloud-native next-generation application firewall offering deep API request inspection to find harmful payloads. It also helps administrators to identify their online application exposure by identifying APIs that don’t require authentication, and by spotting ‘shadow’ APIs that should have been taken down but which are still operational, exposing company data.

Wallarm offers features including real-time blocking of OWASP’s top ten web application threats, but also helps to detect and prevent attacks that exploit business logic, application misconfiguration, API abuse, and account takeovers. And it does all this with zero latency.

The software abandons signature-based detection in favor of Libdetection, an attack detection engine that uses syntax analysis, enabling Wallarm to capture attacks that other WAFs would not. It offers low false positives from day one, but then improves its accuracy over time as it collects metadata to help define application-specific rules.

Functionality like this helps companies get closer to a common goal that is becoming more pressing as attack volumes rise: automated detection and rapid response. And because Wallarm runs natively in the cloud, they can embed it directly into the Lumen platform.

Our ability to support containerized workloads in the cloud or at the edge complements Wallarm’s cloud-native functionality. Together, they enable companies to share workflows between the security and development teams: a critical asset for companies interested in DevSecOps, which inserts security directly into the DevOps life cycle. They can design security measures into the software at an architectural level and then maintain them operationally.

Wallarm is one example of a NextGen Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) solution available through the Lumen application delivery marketplace that highlights the flexibility of a platform built to embrace new, software-defined operation from the beginning. And there are many others for security and other use cases.

Listen in as Lumen and Wallarm explore the advantages of our integrated application delivery and security model.

Talk to us about how we can help you take your applications and security to the next level when supporting a geographically diverse user base.

This content is provided for informational purposes only and may require additional research and substantiation by the end user. In addition, the information is provided “as is” without any warranty or condition of any kind, either express or implied. Use of this information is at the end user’s own risk. Lumen does not warrant that the information will meet the end user’s requirements or that the implementation or usage of this information will result in the desired outcome of the end user. This document represents Lumen’s products and offerings as of the date of issue. Services not available everywhere. Business customers only. Lumen may change or cancel products and services or substitute similar products and services at its sole discretion without notice. All third-party company and product or service names referenced in this article are for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement or affiliation with Lumen. ©2021 Lumen Technologies. All Rights Reserved.