Fortifying Your Digital Fortress: Advanced Security with Cloudflare Enterprise

You’ve chosen a brand or product name, secured trademarks, and acquired domain names. I trust that you’ve evaluated your global domain name coverage and searched for potential infringements or areas of vulnerability to your digital estate. If not, we would love to talk to you!

In previous articles, we discussed the importance of selecting a capable partner, like 101domain, for domain name and brand protection. We also looked at our philosophy of Establish. Grow. Protect, focusing on protecting your digital estate with our partner Red Sift’s OnDMARC, Attack Surface Monitoring, and Certificate Monitoring solutions.  If you missed these, check out the series here.

Today, we will continue this journey by exploring how Cloudflare’s solutions can help you fortify your digital presence and build a robust, secure foundation for your online and organizational success.  While it’s a longer read, I assure you it’s worthwhile.

As your business grows, so does your digital estate. Your websites, applications, internal network, assets, and infrastructure become increasingly complex, demanding robust security measures, and perhaps too many people and resources to manage all of them. If you’re in this boat, you’re not alone.   

Organizations face numerous challenges when growing, managing, and modernizing their network infrastructure, including:

• Complexity and Costs: Juggling multiple vendors and disparate solutions can lead to a complex and costly IT environment. Hardware refreshes, cloud egress fees, and unexpected charges can quickly inflate your budget.
• Performance and Security: In today’s interconnected world, ensuring optimal performance and robust security is paramount, for employees and customers. Distributed users, security vulnerabilities, and latency issues can significantly impact user experience and business operations.
• Rapid Deployment and Time to Value: The need for speed is crucial in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. A lack of streamlined development processes can slow down deployment, hindering innovation and delaying time to value.
• Loss of Control: As organizations have adopted cloud services and embraced remote work, most have found themselves grappling with a loss of control over their expanded network environment.

Cloudflare’ connectivity cloud provides a solution to these challenges by offering a unified, composable platform of cloud-native services.  Think of it as building a digital fortress around your valuable assets.  Here’s how Cloudflare Enterprise can help:

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Network Security: Protection for Websites, DNS, and Infrastructure

Cloudflare’s network is vast, encompassing over 330 cities worldwide. This expansive network provides a first line of defense against malicious actors. Attacks are mitigated at the nearest location, ensuring minimal latency and maximum protection. Cloudflare’s suite of security tools works in concert to safeguard your entire digital ecosystem:

• DDoS Protection: Cloudflare’s global network, with a capacity of 280 Tbps, safeguards websites, applications, and networks from DDoS attacks by providing automatic, intelligent mitigation from the edge of its global network. This protection is free of cost and offers unmetered mitigation, ensuring no penalties for traffic spikes caused by attacks. Additionally, the unmatched network resiliency helps avoid attack-related outages, and built-in analytics provide insights into traffic patterns and threats observed.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN): Cloudflare’s globally distributed network of servers copies and serves your web content closer to your users, reducing latency, improving website and application performance, increasing reliability by routing around congestion, using the most reliable paths, and implementing end-to-end traffic encryption across the network to protect web traffic from attackers. Additionally, the CDN can reduce costs by minimizing content requests to your servers, reducing latency, server load, and bandwidth usage.
• Load Balancing: Cloudflare intelligently distributes web and internal traffic across multiple servers, optimizing performance and ensuring high availability. This means faster loading times and a smoother user experience for your employees and customers.
• WAF (Web Application Firewall): Cloudflare’s WAF acts as a shield, filtering out malicious traffic and protecting your web applications from a wide range of threats, including cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and zero-day exploits.  Serving 20% of the world’s internet traffic positions Cloudflare at the forefront of threat detection trends and expertise.
• API Gateway: Provides security and monitoring for APIs, ensuring secure access and protection against attacks.
• Bot Management: This service identifies and mitigates malicious bot traffic, protecting websites and applications from automated attacks, credential stuffing, and other malicious activities.

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Zero Trust and SASE: Elevating Network Security Inside & Out

As organizations have increasingly adopted cloud services and distributed and hybrid workforces, traditional network security measures have become insufficient.  Traditionally, organizations have leaned on complex and expensive hardware and software virtual private network (VPN) solutions.  Cloudflare’s Zero Trust and SASE solutions offer a comprehensive approach to network security, addressing these challenges in today’s digital and worker landscape.

Zero Trust is a security framework that assumes no user or device inside or outside the network should be trusted by default. VPNs, on the other hand, establish an encrypted tunnel that grants broad network access once a user is authenticated, essentially placing trust in the user and their device within the VPN.  SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) combines networking and security functions in a cloud-based service to deliver secure access to applications and data from anywhere.

Cloudflare’s Zero Trust and SASE solutions can transform an organization’s security approach by:

• Replacing Firewalls: Traditional firewalls rely on perimeter-based security, which is becoming less effective in today’s cloud-centric and remote work environments. Zero Trust replaces this with a more granular approach, focusing on verifying every user and device before granting access.
• Controlling Inbound and Outbound Traffic: Cloudflare’s SASE platform inspects and filters all traffic, both inbound and outbound, ensuring that only authorized traffic is allowed.  See and control what applications and data users are accessing and where  network traffic is going.
• Controlling Access to Company Applications and Assets: Zero Trust principles enforce strict access controls based on user identity, device posture, and other contextual factors. This ensures only authorized individuals can access sensitive applications and data.
• Controlling Access to Public Websites: SASE solutions include secure web gateway capabilities, allowing organizations to control and secure access to public websites, protecting users from malicious content and threats.
• Controlling Employee Use of AI Tools: Cloudflare’s Zero Trust can be used to control and monitor employee use of AI tools. By using tools like CASB and RBI, security teams can detect and approve AI app usage, scan for misconfigurations that risk data leaks via APIs, or run AI apps in isolated browsers to restrict data inputs and outputs. Organizations can also:
  • Define and enforce acceptable use policies.
  • Conduct impact assessments per privacy and AI regulations.
  • Monitor workforce and automated service usage via app & API traffic.
  • Filter data inputs & outputs for IP, confidentiality & copyright.
  • Block access as a last resort.
  • Implement identity-based Zero Trust access controls to apps, engineering tools & infrastructure.
• Controlling Network Traffic: Cloudflare’s network services provide comprehensive solutions for managing and securing network traffic, including DDoS protection, traffic acceleration, and more. These tools help organizations protect their applications, data, websites, and networks without sacrificing performance.
  

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In Real Life:  Five Use Cases of Cloudflare’s Services

Here are five impactful use cases of Cloudflare’s services that have tremendously helped transform company efficiency and security.  For more, visit here.

1. Securing Remote Access for Hybrid Workforces: Replace traditional VPNs with Zero Trust Network Access, providing secure and seamless access to internal applications for remote employees.  Mindbody, a Cloudflare customer, successfully implemented this, replacing seven standalone products with one integrated, user-friendly solution. Their false-positive account blocks decreased from several per day to one or two per week, and remote contractors gained secure, Zero Trust access to corporate apps.
2. Protecting Against DDoS Attacks: Cloudflare’s DDoS protection safeguards websites and applications from disruptions, ensuring business continuity and customer satisfaction.  Zalando, a fashion retailer, faced constant DDoS attacks that caused fulfillment backlogs. They adopted Magic Transit, Cloudflare’s network DDoS mitigation service, to block over 200 attacks per week, freeing up engineering time for more strategic work.
3. Accelerating Website and Application Performance: Cloudflare’s CDN and Argo Smart Routing optimize content delivery, improve page load times, and enhance user experience.  Canva, a design platform, transmits about 4 petabytes of data a month and relies on Cloudflare to handle that bandwidth while maintaining security.
4. Securing APIs and Preventing Data Breaches: Cloudflare’s API Gateway and WAF protect APIs from unauthorized access and attacks, securing sensitive data and maintaining compliance.
5. Simplifying Network Management and Reducing Costs: Cloudflare’s Network Services allow businesses to consolidate networking and security functions into a single, cloud-based platform, reducing complexity and operational costs.  Applied Systems consolidated large swaths of security and networking functionalities on Cloudflare, including protections and performance enhancements for public-facing websites and apps, secure and scalable connectivity across network infrastructure, and a Zero Trust security posture for employees and internal resources.

By implementing these solutions, these organizations have enhanced their security posture, improved performance, and streamlined operations, ultimately contributing to their overall success.

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Putting it Together: A Custom Approach Tailored to Your Specific Needs

Cloudflare’s solutions are not a one-size fits all approach.  If you are utilizing any of their self-service plans or our SWA plans, there’s so much more you can be benefiting from and there is likely cost and complexity you can eliminate.

We work with you at every stage of your contract to ensure you get the most out of your investment and are here to help whenever you need it.  

Working with 101domain, you can expect:

• Design and Implementation: We will collaborate with you to design and implement the solutions that align with your specific business objectives. We work closely to understand your security requirements, budget, and goals to develop a personalized solution.
• Best Practices and Insights: 101domain’s team stays informed about the latest security best practices and innovations in the field.  We share these insights with our clients, helping them stay ahead of potential threats and leverage new technologies and approaches to enhance their security posture.
• Proactive Monitoring: Our Customer Success team proactively monitors clients’ services for potential issues before they impact the client’s business operations.
• Proactive Support: We provide proactive support to our clients every step of the way. From the initial assessment and implementation to ongoing management and optimization, we work closely to ensure a smooth and successful experience.
• Ongoing Support and Guidance: Our Solutions and Customer Success teams provide ongoing support and guidance to clients to ensure they get the most out of their Cloudflare investment. We offer regular check-ins, technical assistance, and educational resources to help clients understand and utilize their Cloudflare solution effectively.

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Cloudflare’s cloud connectivity: network and application security, Zero Trust and SASE platforms offer a comprehensive approach to network security, helping organizations transform their security approach for today’s digital and hybrid worker landscape. 

By choosing Cloudflare and 101domain, you can enhance your security posture, improve performance, and streamline operations.

Give us a call, we’d love to create an amazing solution for you.