User experience is the cornerstone of any successful online business. For developers, much of this boils down to application performance. A critical aspect of performance is latency: the time it takes for a system to respond to a user's request. High latency can lead to frustration, decreased engagement, and ultimately, lost revenue.
Bot attacks also threaten user experience. Malicious bots can wreak havoc on websites and applications, from scraping proprietary content to launching account takeover attacks to making fraudulent purchases with stolen credit cards. In today’s digital landscape, deploying a bot management solution is critical. But equally critical is ensuring that the solution does not add latency for human users. To detect and block bots, traditional bot management solutions frequently rely on slow and costly server-to-server calls, which can significantly increase latency.
HUMAN's low-latency approach
HUMAN offers a unique approach to bot protection that prioritizes both security and user experience. Our patented technology analyzes user behavior in real time, identifying trusted users and minimizing the need for slow, resource-intensive server-side checks. The result is 0ms page-request impact for 85% of human website visitors and <2ms page-request impact for 95% of requests. Meanwhile, bots experience higher, controlled latency.
We analyze every user interaction on your site, but only execute server-to-server calls for suspicious requests. The HUMAN decision engine continuously monitors user behavior, such as mouse movements, keystrokes, and click patterns, and continuously updates decisions accordingly. This enables us to identify trusted users and allow their requests to pass through HUMAN’s decision engine without server-side checks.
Here’s how it works:
- Requests that have been identified as a real human receive an encrypted token. This token is decrypted at the edge, bypassing the need for a server-to-server call and eliminating additional latency.
- As the user continues to browse the application the signal is asynchronously re-evaluated to confirm that it is legitimate. This keeps latency to a minimum while ensuring detection accuracy.
- For highly sensitive actions (e.g., logging into an account), a full server-to-server call occurs.
The benefits of HUMAN's approach
HUMAN combines real-time behavioral analysis, optimized traffic routing, and adaptive detection to prioritize a fast online experience for real humans while making bots pay the latency price. The solution yields several key benefits:
- Reduced latency. By minimizing server-to-server calls, HUMAN significantly reduces latency, resulting in faster page load times and improved user experience.
- Enhanced security. Our robust detection capabilities effectively identify and block sophisticated bots, protecting your applications from a wide range of automated threats, including account takeover, scraping, and carding.
- Scalability. HUMAN's global network and efficient architecture can handle massive traffic spikes, ensuring optimal performance under heavy load.
According to the senior director, architecture at FanDuel, “We seamlessly integrated Application Protection at our platform edge to ensure maximum protection against automated bot attacks, but also to minimize latency.” HUMAN prioritizes user experience, offering a compelling solution for businesses seeking to protect their digital assets while delivering exceptional performance.
Global PoPs network
HUMAN protects some of the largest online businesses in the world with a robust network of global points of presence (PoPs) across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. New locations are established regularly to enable customers to respond quickly to evolving threats and reduce latency for end users.
However, we’d be remiss to conflate PoPs with latency. Although expanding to multiple regions is often seen as a way to enhance latency and performance, this viewpoint sometimes overlooks limitations in infrastructure design. When latency comes down to a vendor’s PoPs distribution, it might be compensating for average-quality detection mechanisms and network inefficiencies. This approach increases operational complexity and costs in order to speed up repeated server-to-server calls, without addressing core issues in the solution's architecture.
Industry-leading detection and performance
HUMAN’s patented technology optimizes both detection and performance, which preserves your user experience. Using encrypted cookies to identify trusted users minimizes the need for server-to-server calls, and analyzing every interaction allows us to continuously update decisions without server-side checks. This streamlined process reduces latency and minimizes dependency on the PoPs network in-and-of itself, ensuring superior user experience without compromising detection accuracy.
HUMAN’s solutions, powered by a global sensor network and 400-plus advanced algorithms, provide unmatched scale, speed, and decision precision. Customers and analysts alike praise HUMAN’s industry-leading bot protection. Click here to book a demo.
