You’ve probably been seeing and hearing of Cloudflare cyber security services everywhere in the news. Cloudflare is a cloud-based web infrastructure and website security company that provides a content delivery network (CDN), DDoS mitigation, and global DNS services. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what any of that means because we are going to break it down for you.
What are today’s cyber security concerns?
You can’t deny the impact that the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has had on the workplace landscape. According to Google Workplace Analytics, up to 30% of employees will work from home multiple days a week by 2021. With more people working from home, cyber security is a primary concern for businesses everywhere—and rightly so. Cybercriminals such as phishing attackers are taking advantage of employees working from home and not on their corporate networks and attacking weak links. Businesses need a new way to protect their employees and networks in this unchartered “work from anywhere” digital age.
What will infrastructure cyber security look like in the future?
Cloudflare believes that cloud security systems are the answer to tomorrow’s cyber security concerns. At a roundtable discussion with industry executives, Cloudflare COO Michelle Zatlyn predicts the future of cyber security to Business Insider saying it will work more like a “water filtration system”. “You’re going to get to a point where it’s almost like the water treatment filtration systems: If you’re connected to the Internet, you’re going to connect through a cyber security network like Cloudflare or some others,” Zatlyn said. “And we’re going to cleanse it and make sure whatever’s passing through us is clean.”
Photo Credit: Business Insider
Cyber security systems like Cloudflare will detect whether users are authentic or imposters and filter out attackers earlier in their attacks before they can do damage.
Cloudflare cyber security solutions
Your website is arguably your most important asset for conducting business with customers and suppliers. As more and more business transitions online and shift to remote work, securing your web infrastructure is imperative. We’ll help you get your website online and keep it there with Secure Web Accelerator powered by Cloudflare.
Web Application Firewall
A WAF or Web Application Firewall helps protect web applications by monitoring and filtering out HTTP traffic between a web application and the Internet. You can enable Cloudflare’s WAF with the click of a button to protect your website and web infrastructure from attacks such as app vulnerability, DDoS, SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Man-in-the-middle, malware, and more.
DDoS Protection
Layer 7 DDoS attacks attempt to overwhelm a network or server with a flood of traffic. An example of this is sending thousands of requests per second to a certain webpage until the server is overwhelmed and cannot respond to all of the requests. Another example would be calling an API over and over until the service crashes.
Although 7 layer DDoS attacks are typically difficult to defend against, the Cloudflare network includes built-in DDoS protection. Cloudflare has a network of 200 data centers worldwide, as is able to absorb massive amounts of layer 7 traffic.
If your domain is on the Cloudflare global network you will be protected against DDoS attacks no matter which layer they’re targeting. Cloudflare cyber security best practices are easy to implement on your website.
Rate Limiting
Cloudflare rate limiting protects against DDoS attacks, brute-force login attempts, and other types of abusive behavior that targets a web application. Rate Limiting protects your mission-critical web applications by providing an environment to block or qualify visitors with suspicious request rates. Cloudflare rate limiting can be activated for free with Secure Web Accelerator Plus for up to 10,000 free requests per month. Secure Web Accelerator Pro plans allow for unlimited rate limiting.
Bot Management
Cloudflare bot management will recommend rules you can use to manage good and bad bots in real-time. All with quick and easy deployment. You can use Cloudflare’s bot management rules “out-of-the-box” or tune them to fit your specific needs. Create rules based on a number of patterns and improve your cybersecurity with Bot Analytics in the Cloudflare dashboard.
SSL/TLS/DNSSEC
Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption enables secure HTTPS connections between visitors and the origin server. Having TLS/SSL on your web infrastructure prevents cyberattacks, browser trust warning messages, and more. Cloudflare also has easy to deploy DNSSEC. You can think of DNSSEC as the Internet’s non-spoofable caller ID. It guarantees traffic coming to your website is not intercepted by a hidden attacker, protecting both your web infrastructure and site visitor from attack.
Secure Web Accelerator Plus
Secure Web Accelerator powered by Cloudflare with DNSSEC adds a layer of authentication on top of your DNS to improve your site’s security, speed, and reliability starting a less than $20/month.