DDoS attacks are larger, more frequent, and more distributed than ever, while modern applications increasingly depend on low latency to maintain performance, conversion rates, and user experience.
In this scenario, the challenge is no longer simply blocking attacks, but doing so without turning the security layer itself into a source of performance degradation.
Among the components that concern infrastructure teams the most are WAFs and DDoS mitigation mechanisms. Both are essential for protecting applications, but they are also frequently associated with performance impacts.
In traditional architectures, the inspection performed by these solutions may require traffic rerouting, remote processing, bottlenecks caused by concentrating analysis in one or a few locations, and multiple validation steps before a request reaches the application. When this happens, protection continues to function, but the user experience may be affected.
Security controls continue to operate correctly, but response times increase while the source of the latency remains difficult to identify.
When Do WAF and DDoS Mitigation Impact Performance?
For many years, the industry treated security and performance as competing objectives. This perception emerged because many security solutions were designed for centralized architectures.
In this model, traffic is not necessarily analyzed where it enters the network. Before reaching the application, it may be redirected to dedicated inspection centers responsible for applying WAF rules, DDoS mitigation, bot management, and other protection layers.
In practice, this means a request does not always follow the shortest path between the user and the application.
In many cases, traffic takes a detour for inspection before continuing to its final destination. This behavior is known as hairpinning.
User → Nearest PoP → Centralized Processing Center → Origin → UserAlthough this process occurs in milliseconds, it adds an extra step to the request flow. The greater the distance between the traffic entry point and the location where inspection occurs, the greater the accumulated impact tends to be.
The issue becomes even more significant as protection policies grow more sophisticated. Advanced WAF rules, bot behavioral analysis, and adaptive rate-limiting mechanisms increase an application’s defensive capabilities, but they also increase dependence on an efficient architecture capable of processing these decisions in real time.
How Hairpinning and Backhauling Create Latency
Hairpinning is only a symptom of a larger issue: the need to transport traffic to a location different from where it entered the network so inspection can take place—most often in a centralized environment.
This process is known as backhauling.
In centralized architectures, traffic often needs to travel hundreds or even thousands of additional miles before reaching the application.
This behavior is particularly common in traditional DDoS mitigation strategies that rely on centralized scrubbing centers to filter malicious traffic before forwarding it to the origin.
While effective at absorbing volumetric attacks, these models often increase the distance traveled by legitimate requests, introducing additional latency into the process.
The impact typically appears in metrics such as increased response times, degraded Time to First Byte (TTFB), and worsening Core Web Vitals.
The challenge is that these metrics reveal the symptom, but not always the cause.
As a result, backhauling-related issues are often difficult to diagnose. The application remains healthy. Servers show no bottlenecks. The database responds normally. Yet users still experience slowness.
How Distributed Architectures Reduce Security Latency
If the main issue is the additional path traffic must travel during inspection, the solution is not to reduce the depth of analysis. The challenge is to move mitigation closer to where traffic enters the network.
This is precisely what differentiates a distributed architecture from traditional WAF and DDoS mitigation models based on centralized processing.
On the Azion Platform, WAF, DDoS Protection, Bot Manager, and Network Shield operate across more than 100 globally distributed data centers.
This means inspection happens locally, within the same environment responsible for receiving the user’s connection. The traffic flow becomes:
User → Nearest Data Center (Inspection and Mitigation) → OriginAt first glance, the difference compared to a centralized model may seem small. In practice, it eliminates the detours that characterize hairpinning and backhauling.
Because inspection takes place at the request entry point, traffic can proceed directly to the application, reducing the latency introduced by the security layer itself.
Distributed Scrubbing: Mitigating DDoS Attacks Without Traffic Redirection
Unlike models that rely exclusively on centralized scrubbing centers to process suspicious traffic, Azion’s architecture allows each data center across the network to perform scrubbing locally.
This means that during a volumetric DDoS attack, malicious traffic is filtered at the point of entry itself, eliminating the need to redirect traffic to remote processing centers.
Legitimate traffic proceeds directly to the origin, preserving performance even during large-scale attacks.
This model distributes mitigation capacity across the global network. Instead of concentrating all processing load in a few locations, each data center absorbs its share of the attack, maintaining stable operations for legitimate users.
Case Study: GPA Mitigated a DDoS Attack and Protected 100+ Applications in 15 Days
The difference between centralized and distributed architectures is not merely theoretical. It becomes evident in real-world crisis situations.
Grupo Pão de Açúcar (GPA), one of the largest food retail chains in Latin America, faced a DDoS attack targeting its DNS services. During the incident, the team needed to respond quickly while keeping its e-commerce operations running.
The solution came through a migration to the Azion Platform, which included:
- DDoS Protection to mitigate the attack in real time
- Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect against SQL Injection and XSS
- Bot Manager to prevent automated threats and fraud
- SIEM integration for threat visibility
After three days under attack, the team stabilized operations. Within 15 days, more than 100 mission-critical applications had been migrated and protected, with no downtime.
The result: 92% of requests were delivered through Azion’s distributed platform, with significantly lower latency. The company also achieved a 30% reduction in cloud costs.
Migrating to the Azion Platform was a crucial decision. We left behind the limitations of a legacy provider and gained greater agility and resilience. Azion protected us from sophisticated cyberattacks while enabling us to modernize our infrastructure, reduce costs, and deliver the best shopping experiences to millions of customers.
— Allan Monteiro, CISO & Head of Technology at GPA
Read the full GPA case study →
How to Identify Latency Caused by the Security Layer
Identifying when the security layer itself is causing degradation is not always straightforward.
While applications, infrastructure, and databases are typically covered by monitoring tools, security events are often spread across multiple systems.
The result is a slower investigation process with less context. Without unified visibility, correlating performance anomalies with security events may require hours or even days of analysis.
With Real-Time Events, Azion centralizes traffic and security data within a single observability environment. Events generated by WAF, DDoS Protection, Bot Manager, Network Shield, and Functions can be analyzed together, enabling teams to investigate anomalies without switching between multiple consoles.
In most cases, events become available in less than a minute, making it possible to quickly determine whether a performance anomaly is related to a security policy, detected bot activity, or a specific configuration.
Is It Possible to Mitigate Attacks Without Compromising Performance?
For many years, organizations believed that protecting applications against DDoS attacks and WAF-detected threats required accepting some degree of performance impact.
That perception made sense in an environment where inspection depended on remote processing centers and centralized scrubbing facilities.
Today, the challenge is not simply blocking attacks. It is doing so without adding latency, operational complexity, or blind spots during performance investigations.
Distributed architectures change this equation by bringing mitigation closer to where traffic enters the network. By eliminating hairpinning, backhauling, and dependence on centralized inspection centers, organizations can protect applications without compromising user experience.
If your team is experiencing unexplained latency issues, it may be worth looking beyond the application itself. In many cases, the bottleneck is not in the code, database, or origin infrastructure, but in how the security layer was designed to operate.
Discover how Azion can help your organization implement real-time attack mitigation without compromising performance.
Want to see this architecture in action? Watch the webinar “How to Mitigate Attacks on Web Applications and APIs” for a technical demonstration of distributed mitigation.
