SaaS-based businesses are on the rise more than ever. Old businesses are rushing to turn their legacy software into SaaS-based solutions and new businesses are popping up offering SaaS-based solutions to everything imaginable. SaaS-based solutions are made up of multi-layered complex architecture with both internal and external components that require strategic constant monitoring and optimization.

When a customer notifies you that your website is down, it has far more severe consequences than just embarrassment. Website downtime can mean loss of money, reputation, credibility and in a lot of cases, the overall feeling of security of your customers. As a survey report from Gartner showed website downtime can cost nearly $5,600 per minute to some companies. So, what are the issues that can cause website downtime, and how can you prevent it?

With the digital landscape shifting everything on the web, and companies fighting for better user experiences, your sites and applications are no longer just a part of your business, it is the business. But how do you to go about it and remain successful? This is where monitoring and performance management comes into the picture. Not only just for business people, IT teams have also a significant role to play in business growth and revenue optimization.

In the internet ecosystem of increasingly intertwined applications, when one application wants to perform some action on another application on the behalf of a user, a need arises of how to do this without sharing the password of one application to another. A common example of this is sign-in with Facebook by apps that want to post something on your timeline or want to access your Google Drive.

It’s probably true to say that if you asked an average user what makes a great web application, they’d probably say “speed.” But speed is the probably the least important aspect of an extensive rundown of elements. Factors like application development and rendering in the program are probably higher on that list. And what makes up a great performing application? And when something goes wrong, how do you know?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems provide core directory services, application access management, and authentication and authorization services. IAM also helps developers with a base platform to provide access control to their applications based on centralized policies and rules. IAM manages user details, authentication, and access information for an organization. The responsibility of user management and authentication creates a great dependency on IAM.

With enterprise solutions and consumer technology platforms offering an array of applications, a need arises to securely navigate between different applications within the same product suite, and on role-based access. Single sign-on (SSO) is a solution to implement a centralized authentication system, and maintains an authenticated session to access multiple applications in a product suite without having the need of entering user credentials every time.

Our digital world is evolving and advancing at an unimaginable pace – and so are the expectations of end users. Momentum is everything in today’s united world, and having a poor performing website or application will likely result in the confidence of your products and services. And worse yet, any dissatisfaction perceived from the user will also likely result in them going straight to your competitor. This is an immediate impact on your revenue, brand, and customer confidence.

The complexity of an application’s digital architecture is increasing dramatically every day. In an era of cloud infrastructure, the goal is to integrate all your web services into one place: CDN, DNS, third-party API services, QA tools, analytics tools, and any other component you can think of, are working with each other to make your services function. With so many components in place for an application to run, each one of these behaves like its own black box within your IT infrastructure.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of distributed nodes, called edge servers, connected to the same origin servers and placed local to the users’ location. If you are using a CDN, your website content is delivered to the user from the nearest edge server to their location. Without a CDN, you are putting stress on the origin server every time a user requests something.