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The increase of digitalization brings risks and opportunities alike, and the media industry is no exception to that. The NZZ data analysis team, led by Markus Barmettler, used a Microsoft Excel-based reporting solution in combination with ad-hoc analysis when necessary. In October 2014, the team chose to migrate to a Tableau solution in an effort to be able to quickly react to market opportunities. Before the NZZ team could reap the rewards of new and profitable insights, it needed to redefine and automate its in-house data collection process. “As we were coming from an Excelbased reporting system, we needed to first set up a data warehouse,” says Barmettler.

SK Telecom, a leading wireless communications operator in Korea, has been facing challenges due to the rise in mobile data and signaling traffic, driven by the increasing usage of 3G and 4G devices such as smartphones and tablets. The company has also been dealing with the threat of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and mobile application anomalies. Over the last three years, the number of attacks against their mobile network has increased five-fold. These attacks put additional traffic on an already stressed mobile network infrastructure, making it vital for these attacks to be detected and stopped as soon as possible. Additionally, poorly written mobile applications can cause major problems when popular mobile apps used by millions of subscribers encounter problems, acting like a DDoS attack on the mobile network.

SdV Plurimedia, a leading hosting and Web services provider in France, is held to strict contractual obligations and service level agreements (SLAs) that require it to provide the highest level of data center infrastructure and customer service protection. A majority of SdV’s customers offer public-facing media services that require high performance and 100% uptime. SdV’s customer Web sites are frequently attack targets due to the public and sometimes controversial nature of their content. Therefore, it is common for SdV to see attacks on a daily basis. These attacks not only impact the target customer, but also other customers who share the same data center resources. It’s these types of attacks that would shut down SdV if they didn’t have a DDoS mitigation system in place.

Foreshore Limited, a leading provider of hosting, messaging, storage, distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and other Internet services to the offshore business world, needed to maintain 100 percent Internet connectivity to optimize quality of service and enhance traffic engineering. The company’s non-stop network infrastructure is meeting the rigorous 24/7 operational requirements of international banks, major e-retailers and electronic payment providers. Foreshore backs its services with 100 percent service level agreements and a six-year track record of no downtime. In an era of global network security threats that are ever-increasing in size and frequency, DDoS detection and mitigation are critical to Foreshore’s continued success and that of its customers.

Bulletproof Networks, a tier-one managed hosting provider in Australia, was facing an increasing number of DDoS attacks on its network. Several of Bulletproof’s customers use its managed cloud service to host business-critical transactional websites. For these customers, site availability is critical to their existence; any amount of downtime can mean significant losses. Bulletproof also hosts a number of sites that are attractive targets for DDoS attacks. One of these sites, a technology forum, includes more than 300,000 active members who have been known to launch attacks at one another over disagreements. As a result, Bulletproof started to see an increasing number of DDoS attacks come across its network. To combat the attacks, Bulletproof put a process in place with its upstream providers. This process enabled the company to contact a provider during an attack to see if the provider could help block it from reaching the data center. The challenge with this approach was two-fold. First, the providers were not as quick to react to the attacks, causing a delay in mitigation and downtime for the hosted sites. Also, the only realistic way for the provider to assist was to blackhole the targeted site. While this stopped flooding to the Internet link, it still left the customer offline.

Netregistry, Australia’s largest provider of domain names and one of the most trusted Web hosts for small business, was facing an increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, particularly recent Domain Name System (DNS) reflection attacks. The company provides multiple services—including domain registry, Web hosting and Web design—to more than 500,000 clients. As a hosting provider, Netregistry is no stranger to DDoS attacks and had many processes already in place for handling them. However, the increase in attacks prompted the company to seek help from an outside provider. Netregistry evaluated a number of companies and outsourcing providers that offer DDoS protection services. However, these companies typically only scrub traffic for a single domain name, which was not feasible for Netregistry due to its large and varied customer base.

Hostopia, a leading wholesale provider of private-label Web services, was facing a significant challenge in mitigating the ever-increasing frequency, size, and complexity of DDoS attacks against its network infrastructure and customer services. The technical team at Hostopia had been effective in dealing with DDoS attacks of several gigabits in magnitude, but the effort required was significant. This process required a lot of manual work by several key staff members with very specialized skill sets. Looking to the future, Hostopia realized that scaling its response would be difficult given the anticipated growth in the size and frequency of these attacks. The company was looking for a holistic solution—one that not only would detect DDoS attacks but would also defend against them.

iWeb, a data center operator and web hosting provider, was facing frequent DDoS attacks that were causing downtime for their clients and impacting their revenue. The attacks were not only affecting the targeted client but also causing collateral damage to multiple customers sharing the data center's infrastructure. The company needed to contain the attack as soon as possible to reduce the collateral damage and the time and staff required to manage an attack. iWeb started investing in DDoS protection solutions to get a better overview of their ever-growing network and obtain precise details regarding any DDoS attack, especially its type, size, and origin.

Neo Telecoms, a Paris-based company providing Pan-European and U.S. Internet connectivity and hosting services, was facing challenges in managing its rapidly growing network. The company's in-house developed tools based on open-source code were no longer sufficient as the network expanded to multi-10 Gbps connectivity and a 150 Gbps backbone. Even the commercial tools they had started to fail. The company needed a solution that was easy to use and could provide cost-effective visibility into the entire network.

Easynet Limited, a global, IP-based managed services organization, was facing the challenge of managing, protecting, and supporting a rapidly growing worldwide IP services network. The company provides network, hosting, and telepresence solutions to multinational corporations and has over 3,000 customers and eight million end users utilizing one million network connections to its global IP backbone. The company was experiencing significant growth in its transit and peering business, making it increasingly complex to manually conduct traffic management and peering analysis using in-house tools. Additionally, due to Easynet’s global IP backbone, DDoS attacks were a regular occurrence, especially for some of its bigger hosting customers, such as betting/gaming sites that are prime targets for DDoS attacks.

Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) are facing increasing challenges due to the rise in size, frequency, and complexity of DDoS attacks. These challenges include the risk of not having enough capacity to manage very large attacks, staying abreast of latest DDoS attack trends, attack vectors, attackers, attack tools and targets, the constant requirement of training network security personnel and operations staff, retaining experienced, coveted staff that is constantly lured by stiff competition, and maintaining and enhancing their DDoS attack protection infrastructure such as circuits, data centers, customer portals and attack mitigation products.

Comcast Corporation, a leading media, entertainment, and communications company, was faced with the challenge of transitioning its network and services from IPv4 to IPv6. This transition was necessitated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) distributing the last five blocks of IPv4 addresses to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Comcast had to ensure the technological readiness of its entire network and service infrastructure, including core network readiness, support for IPv6 across the back-office systems, and access network IPv6 readiness.

XO Communications, one of the largest service providers in the United States, was facing challenges in managing its rapidly growing network and dealing with traffic congestion. The company had basic visibility into traffic statistics, such as bytes in/out, but this was not granular enough to tell where the traffic was coming from or going to. The company also had to constantly determine if the traffic was legitimate or illegitimate. Removing congestion due to legitimate traffic was fine, but if done for illegitimate traffic, it actually made matters worse. The company knew that Netflow, a technology already embedded in the company’s network infrastructure equipment, had the information they were looking for. However, conducting their own in-house Netflow analysis proved to be a large undertaking due to the huge amount of data that needed to be collected, analyzed and turned into something presentable.

Covad Communications, a leading U.S. service provider, faced the dual challenges of network security and traffic engineering. The company needed to proactively defend against DDoS attacks and optimize network performance. The rising number of network attacks was a significant challenge for the service provider. Customers typically held their providers accountable for such external attacks, viewing them as problems within the provider network and equating them with poor service. Additionally, the extra costs due to attack traffic could add up to tens of thousands of dollars a month. Therefore, the ability to quickly identify and shut down these attacks was key to both customer loyalty and cost-effective operations.

The customer, a central European network service provider (NSP) that offers Internet access, domain name system (DNS), IP address allocation and DDoS attack detection and mitigation services to universities, ministries and research organizations, was using Cisco Guard for DDoS attack detection and mitigation. However, they faced two main problems with Cisco Guard. Firstly, the NSP had a 10 Gbps core backbone network, but Cisco Guard only supported 1.2 Gbps of mitigation, and there were no plans to improve this due to the end-of-sale schedule. Secondly, because the NSP used Peakflow SP for attack detection and Cisco Guard for attack mitigation, its staff was forced to learn two different user interfaces, which made attack mitigation more difficult.

The Bay Lights were officially unveiled on March 5, 2013. Brian VanderZanden, Lead Developer at WPI, knew there would be a surge in traffic to TheBayLights.org leading up to that day, and most likely a huge surge in traffic on the day of the unveiling. WPI has many sites on Cloudflare, including TheBayLights.org. He reached out to Cloudflare to make sure the site was ready to handle the increase in traffic. Cloudflare suggested a few small optimizations (minification, an image that wasn’t proxied because on a “grey cloud” DNS record), one useful reminder (white-list the Cloudflare IPs), and a powerful recommendation: Cache Everything.

Luxury Link, a pioneer in the web-based auction model for luxury travel, was facing the challenge of optimizing their website to ensure visitors get the most out of the experience. Their web property experience includes everything from design to merchandising to site performance to SEO and the conversion funnel. These core fundamentals really matter to Luxury Link: performance, SEO, business intelligence, merchandising and seasonal relevance. They were also looking for a better CDN solution when their current contract was up.

CodeGuard, a service that provides backup and protection for websites, was looking for ways to expand its user base and improve its product. The company wanted to reach out to website owners who were interested in securing their sites. However, reaching out to this audience and getting their feedback for product improvement was a challenge.

The San Francisco Marathon is a popular race that attracts 24,000 runners from all over the globe. The website is crucial for registration, organization during the event weekend, and tracking each runner's race time. However, during the race weekend, the website experiences a 400% increase in traffic. The previous year, the servers failed due to the heavy traffic, leading to disgruntled racers. The challenge was to optimize the website for heavy load and prevent server failure.

LearnThat Foundation was facing a challenge with their website, LearnThat.org. Despite successfully driving traffic to the site, they were struggling to keep visitors engaged. The time spent by visitors on the site was low, indicating a lack of engagement and potentially leading to missed opportunities for the foundation. The foundation had heard about Cloudflare at a local meet-up and decided to sign up, hoping to improve the performance of their site and increase visitor engagement.

FounderLY, a media project that showcases entrepreneurs’ stories, prioritizes the design of its website. The platform is image-heavy and uses CSS and JavaScript, which can slow down the website's loading speed. This is a concern as they want to deliver a fast and seamless experience for their readers worldwide. Additionally, the website serves a lot of videos, and while the videos are not handled by Cloudflare, ensuring the rest of the page loads quickly is crucial to keep visitors on the website while they wait for the videos to start. As a startup, FounderLY needed a cost-effective solution to boost their website performance without spending a fortune. They were also under a tight deadline with limited engineering resources.

ShoppingCartElite.com, a full business suite for running an online business, was facing challenges with web performance, security, and SSL needs as it grew. The company was only offering shared SSL, which was not a long-term solution for its customers. During their search for a solution, they suffered a major DoS attack that affected their entire clientele. This situation prompted them to test Cloudflare's service across hundreds of their client's websites.

Christmas.com, a site dedicated to sharing the joy of Christmas, was hit by several large DDoS attacks in early December, their busiest time of the year. The attacks knocked the site offline, disrupting their services and affecting their customers. The site needed a solution to shield them from the attacks and keep their services running smoothly.

Zendesk, a company that provides a customer service platform, experienced significant growth over the years. This growth presented unique challenges in terms of managing and scaling the company. They needed a solution that could enhance their website's performance, deliver content quickly regardless of the visitor's location, protect them from web threats, and optimize their front and back-end systems. The solution needed to be scalable to support Zendesk's rapid growth.

DigitalOcean, the third largest cloud provider on the planet, was facing a potential threat of malicious attacks targeting DNS servers. With a vast number of developers relying on DigitalOcean to serve their content, the company needed to ensure that their DNS resolutions were fast and always online anywhere in the world. Despite not having experienced a DDoS attack, DigitalOcean sought a proactive solution to ensure the security of their DNS infrastructure against such attacks in the future.

Montecito Bank & Trust (MB&T) was in the midst of a complex regulatory discussion that would transition the bank’s website from https:// www.montecito.com to a new domain https://montecito.bank. The .bank extension would incorporate the latest security requirements to reduce phishing, spoofing, and internet scams. In addition, Paul Abramson, Director of Technology at MB&T, recognized the risks a potential security attack could pose to a bank’s website. He needed a vendor to help him meet the industry regulations for the domain change as well as bulletproof the site from sophisticated cyber security threats.

OkCupid, a popular online dating site, was looking for a solution to shield its website from online threats and to ensure strong security and high availability for its growing user base. The company needed a solution that could handle its large volume of traffic and provide robust security protection. Additionally, OkCupid wanted to improve its page load times, particularly for its users in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Buzzlie.com, a popular content site that generates viral content in the celebrity, fashion, and entertainment world, experienced a rapid rise in popularity. However, with this fame came a downside - the site became a target of notorious DDoS attacks. Initially, the company's Co-founder and CTO, Steve Flee, was able to handle the early DDoS attacks on his own. However, as the attacks escalated, the company needed a more robust solution for DDoS protection. They also wanted to expand their user base in Australia, but setting up a data center there was not cost-effective.

Ray White, the largest real estate company in Australia, was looking for a way to improve their market share and make their agents more effective. They wanted to provide their agents with better information about themselves and their offices, so they could then provide that information to their consumers, making them better agents overall. They also wanted to differentiate themselves in the marketplace by providing unique, high-quality visualizations in their reports. However, they faced challenges in terms of making this information easy to use and accessible for their agents, many of whom were not very analytical.

Celsius International is a B2B data marketing company that specializes in managing multicountry data and lead generation programs. They provide multinational corporations with database management and analytics, including creating, enhancing, maintaining, and hosting B2B multicountry databases. The company operates in a specialist niche, providing data and campaign management services in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. However, their old methods required days of human intervention before they could actually start analyzing data. This delay in data analysis was a significant challenge for the company as it affected their efficiency and the quality of service they provided to their customers.