Traffic on-boarding for acceleration through out-of-band security authenticators

A traffic on-boarding method is operative at an acceleration server of an overlay network. It begins at the acceleration server when that server receives an assertion generated by an identity provider (IdP), the IdP having generated the assertion upon receiving an authentication request from a service provider (SP), the SP having generated the authentication request upon receiving from a client a request for a protected resource. The acceleration server receives the assertion and forwards it to the SP, which verifies the assertion and returns to the acceleration server a token, together with the protected resource. The acceleration server then returns a response to the requesting client that includes a version of the protected resource that points back to the acceleration server and not the SP. When the acceleration server then receives an additional request from the client, the acceleration server interacts with the service provider using an overlay network optimization.