What happened 

Shares of Fastly (FSLY 1.87%) were rising 3.2% heading into midday Wednesday after the content delivery network (CDN) provider announced it was making available a beta version of its Signal Sciences agent on its edge cloud platform.

So what

Fastly wants developers to be able to protect their apps and application programming interfaces (APIs) regardless of where they're found -- whether in the cloud, onsite, in a hybrid environment, or at the network edge. 

Padlock and chain on computer keyboard

Image source: Getty Images.

Edge computing allows data center processing to be relocated to the device (or to the "edge," as it were), where real-time processing can occur, allowing for faster response times. The network edge is where a device or local network interfaces with the internet.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and web application attacks are increasing, so edge protections are now more essential that ever for companies.

Now what

A beta version is simply a foray to test the waters to ensure the protections offered work as described and give Fastly the opportunity to further develop robust tools in the future.

Fastly’s stock is down 45% this year as the tech sector fell out of favor following an overheated 2020, though it has little to do with the coding error that caused outages for 85% of its 2,000 or so customers and sent the internet crashing.

Fastly is still a growing business, and its depressed price might be an opportunity to pick up this tech stock at a discount.