DeltaBlue.Cloud is a platform as a service, created for designing, building, deploying and managing custom business applications. It’s a single platform that enables speed, collaboration and control across the entire application lifecycle. We provide a cloud service that offers development and deployment environments for application services.
Cloudflare: how to turn economic uncertainty into opportunity
With a potential recession looming on the horizon, organisations are dealing with unpredictability and shrinking budgets. How to move forward with your business in these times of economic uncertainty?
In this blog post we will have a look at a couple of ways to regain control over your IT priorities and budgets.
Improve security, performance and reliability
If you’re a business wanting to reach out to people anywhere in the world, it’s important that your website is quickly accessible, with as little geography-related latency and break-in threat as possible. You can tackle latency issues in several ways. One of them is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). With a CDN you need to deploy different data centres across the globe. Next to that, you need to have a Domain Name System (DNS) that sends your requests to the nearest edge server. This results in high availability with minimal latency issues.
When you want to mitigate security risks, it’s best to add a software layer or filter to screen web requests before they are serviced by your systems. Consequently, this requires you to extensively invest time and money. How to prevent this? Look for a partner that offers data centres with a global outreach and security features that mitigate most of the risks with minimum investment. Let’s zoom in on the market leader: Cloudflare.
How does Cloudflare work?
Cloudflare is an integrated security and performance suite for web-based applications that tries to eliminate the problems that we discussed above. It acts as a reverse proxy. This means that all traffic will be sent via Cloudflare’s servers, which are spread over 275+ cities in over 100 countries. Cloudflare has the fastest DNS performance worldwide. Additionally, it was recognised as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) report.
Network map Cloudflare. Source: Cloudflare
Cloudflare works on three verticals.
1. Security
They built security into every component of the network. Cloudflare’s 155 terabytes per second network blocks an average of 70 billion threats per day, including some of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded.
2. Performance
Cloudflare uses several techniques to deliver smooth content to your visitors. Their global network is often faster than the Internet. Cloudflare can reach 95% of the world’s population within approximately 50 milliseconds.
3. Reliability
Cloudflare has one of the largest authoritative DNS networks in the world, resolving 1,706 billion DNS queries per day. A website using Cloudflare loads on average twice as fast, uses 60% less bandwidth, has 65% fewer requests and is more secure.
Overview features Cloudflare. Source: Cloudflare
DeltaBlue and Cloudflare: a match made in heaven?
Cloudflare is natively integrated in the DeltaBlue platform. You can activate it with the click of one button in your portal. There’s no need for any set-up or migration. Your domain name can stay put. Next to that, you can activate Cloudflare per environment.
Let’s sum up some more benefits:
- Flexibility. Turn Cloudflare on and off, whenever you like.
- Low pricing. Invoicing is done monthly, pro rata. By choosing DeltaBlue, you can benefit from Cloudflare’s Enterprise features starting at only 125 euro (instead of 3000) per month. Essentially, you get Enterprise features for a lower price than the Business subscription.
- Speed. Stay ahead of your competition, by benefitting from the fastest DNS performance worldwide.
- Transparency. If an issue occurs, Cloudflare will communicate about it clearly. They will tell you how they found it and solved it.
To illustrate the above, how about we look at one of our customers’ stories. The customer - let’s call it Epsilon - has a pigeon auction platform. Their clients, located all over Europe and China, can make real-time bids on Epsilon’s website. Noteworthy, more than 40 percent of its revenue comes from China. Epsilon isn’t located in China though, so hosting a website there is not allowed.
On the one hand you have Europeans that are able to bid in 200 milliseconds. On the other hand, you have bids coming from China that can take up to 30+ seconds to get through, or even create timeouts. Network traffic there is slowed down by the Great Firewall and filtering. At a certain moment, we decided to let Epsilon’s website traffic run through Cloudflare. This resulted in a gigantic improvement: the load times for China went from 30+ seconds to less than 1 second. This in turn led to a better UX for the website visitor, and thus more customers for Epsilon. A win-win for everyone.
To conclude
When you still don’t use Cloudflare, consider it. It is the world’s most connected cloud network. It protects you against DDoS attacks, has an extremely fast DNS-service and extensive caching possibilities.
There are no tradeoffs between security and speed. So, your business can be safer and faster. Simplify operations, reduce costs and gain a critical edge over your competition.
