Since site performance can make or break an e-commerce business, performance must be reliable, fast, and always up. For e-commerce, where every second of web latency can result in as much as a 7% loss in conversion, business continuity means much more than data integrity and recovery. For e-commerce, continuity means no downtime, no delays and no data breaches.
Moreover, as online stores migrate to the public cloud, the attack surface area of applications increases significantly. A malicious attack or a denial of service attack can result in significant damage to a storefront’s brand, revenue, and customer loyalty.
How they solve it: Webscale provides e-commerce businesses with cloud plans that include cloud migration, hosting, management, uptime, and multi-region business continuity. The startup’s e-commerce cloud platform delivers visibility and control over underlying web applications, as well as providing enhanced security features.
Webscale’s Multi-Cloud DR service is designed to keep e-commerce up and performing well, even if their primary cloud provider is suffering from operational downtime, a cyber-attack or a disaster.
The Cloud Backup feature makes a copy of a customer’s entire backend – including the application and data server – on a regular basis. Their Cloud Mirror service enables e-commerce customers to keep a near real-time replica of their backend in an alternate location, usually in another region or cloud.
Both Cloud Backup and Cloud Mirror feature Webscale’s always-on global data plane, which ensures consistent availability, while expediting failover and service restoration. Webscale also constantly monitors cloud provider availability, as well as its customers’ applications for any issues or outages. If downtime occurs, Webscale will automatically failover to the scheduled primary alternate region.
Competitors include: Rackspace, Peer1, Akamai, Fastly and Cloudflare
Customers include: Murad, Signature Hardware, Snake River Farms, Value Pet Suppliers and Samuels Jewelers
Why they’re a hot startup to watch: Webscale has raised more than $18M in VC funding, has assembled a strong leadership team, and has amassed a long list of named customers. By setting its sights on e-commerce, the startup has identified a poorly served web-acceleration/business-continuity niche in which it has a ton of room to grow. Yes, streaming video might be sexier, but latency on an e-commerce site can be downright fatal in this hyper-competitive market.
If Webscale can deliver utility-like service to e-commerce, enough so that e-commerce businesses consider website performance, reliability and continuity as something they just flip a switch to get, the impact on global retail could be massive.
CEO Sonal Puri has a strong track record with startups. She played a key role in Speedera’s sale to Akamai; she was CMO of Aryaka, which recently announced that it will pursue an IPO in 2019, and if Webscale keeps growing at its current pace, it’ll be Puri’s third big startup success story in a row.