Web tech start-up section.io recently announced innovative new features to its globally distributed, caching and security platform, which gives websites developed through it leading edge security and functionality features.
Website developers can now integrate their global website performance and security platform together with the application development process, which significantly reduces development cost and time. This in turn empowers developers to deliver superior website performance and security results.
Stewart McGrath, CEO of section.io stated, “No other content delivery solution provides such a flexible offering and gives total and direct control to the developers themselves.”
What does section.io do?
Founded by Stewart (ex; Graysonline, Microsoft, Ernst & Young) and Daniel Bartholomew (ex; Graysonline, Readify) section.io is a service for developers to deploy website caching in the cloud with; SSL, metrics, logs, and alerting.
section.io provides developers with easy and immediate access to the best platform to help them accelerate and optimize performance of their websites. Users can sign up and within just a couple minutes have a globally distributed cache solution.
The burdens of server deployment, server management, implementation of metrics, logs, and day-to-day management are completely lifted and bench-pressed by section.io.
“We have not seen any truly disruptive innovations in the CDN space for 17 years since Akamai first launched the concept of distributed reverse proxy servers for website caching,” said Steward, when section.io officially launched back in August this year, with funding from the Australian Government’s Commercialization Australia program.
“We are leading a new content delivery paradigm for website developers by providing them with a unique level of control over the caching solution.”
How is section.io doing so far?
section.io already has customers in Australia, the US, the UK, Mexico, Vietnam and India.
“We have signed up some great players, such as well-recognised brands, Thrifty Car Rental, Lorna Jane Temple and Webster, Booktopia, NRMA, Breville, Strandbags, Marcs and Jigsaw and have had the opportunity to work alongside some really interesting businesses, including some of the start-ups that came through season one of TV series, Shark Tank,” Stewart revealed.
“We certainly see no signs of our global reach slowing down. We have a team of nine working in a distributed office with staff all over Sydney and in Wisemans Ferry, Berridale and Adelaide and we also recently rebranded from Squixa to section.io.
“We have been funded by a number of Australian angel investors with three small rounds so far,” he further disclosed to Anthill. “And we are currently engaging with Australian and US venture capital funds pulling together a growth round.”
Entrepreneur and investor, Steve Baxter, commented, “I coudn’t go past working with the section.io team alongside my startup investments on the show as they are an innovative, Aussie company, making an impact both here and on the global stage with their unique, tech solution offering.”
Stewart further commented that with the holiday season fast approaching, section.io presents retailer websites with a ready to go solution for dealing with increased levels of traffic.
“We know from experience how important this Christmas trading period is for many retailers, not only in terms of increased traffic, but also because of heightened security concerns as well.”
What problem is section.io solving?
We caught up with Stewart to tell us more about the gap in the market that his start-up’s service and technology is filling, and below is what he shared.
Nearly half of the world’s Internet traffic now traverses reverse proxy servers, according to Cisco.
section.io is a reverse proxy manager built to provide website developers and operations teams with a new level of control and flexibility over what, how and where reverse proxy servers are deployed in their production, test and development environments.
Reverse proxy technologies form the core of all content delivery solutions (including Content Delivery Networks and Application Delivery Controllers) and are now commonly recognised as an efficient and effective solution to managing the performance, availability and security requirements of websites and HTTP/s traffic generally.
The global content delivery market is expected to reach $12.2 billion by 2020 while the application delivery controller market is expected to reach $2.9 billion by 2020.
There is a large range of powerful open source reverse proxy servers which, when engaged in the delivery chain for websites, can provide a range of benefits for website users and owners with respect to the performance, availability, security and cost to serve of that website.
While there are management platforms for other delivery infrastructure such as application servers, and databases, to date there has been no specialised method for management of reverse proxy servers.
Within a few minutes of signing up to section.io, developers and operations teams have a toolset which delivers their choice of reverse proxies in a variety of deployment styles, from globally distributed networks (like content delivery networks), private content delivery networks, and behind the firewall deployments (like application delivery controllers).
