This week, Cloudflare unveiled SSL for SaaS companies, a wholesale SSL solution that will allow SaaS companies to extend Cloudflare benefits to their customers on their own domain without the need for engineering or support work or any extensive customer set-up.
The need for a wholesale SSL solution stems from the increased pressure on SaaS companies to provide SSL for customers’ hostnames. A variety of influences have added to this trend, including Google’s penalization for non-HTTPS and slow-loading sites, which negatively impacts SEO and discoverability; increased abandonment and lower conversion rates for pages with long load times; and threats that attack, scrape, or modify unsecured applications.
However, the need for providing SSL to SaaS customers on unique domains is frequently hindered by difficulties in implementation, either placing onerous demands on customers or requiring engineering resources to build and maintain a solution. Cloudflare’s SSL for SaaS seeks to address this problem by allowing SaaS companies to easily extend Cloudflare to customers. Customers add the initial CNAME into their domain, after which SaaS companies send a single API call to them. Cloudflare then provisions the hostname for forwarding, acquires SSL certificates to enable HTTPS and HTTP/2, and sits in front of the customer’s site to protect against DDoS and layer 7 attacks on customer websites. In addition, customers of SaaS companies using Cloudflare’s wholesale SSL will receive the same CDN, WAF, HTTP/2, and load balancing benefits as other Cloudflare customers.
SSL for SaaS is available for any bring-your-own-domain SaaS applications, such as content management solutions, eCommerce platforms, web portals, and PaaS companies that allow apps to be served on customer host names. Additional details and Q&A about SSL for SaaS can be obtained via the Cloudflare blog.