Nexylan

Nexylan uses Cloudflare Network Services to reinforce the availability of major French brands’ business-critical sites

Nexylan offers premium managed hosting services to some of the biggest brands in France, including Decathlon, Zodio (groupe Adeo), Alten, Zoomalia, and Europcar. Since their founding in 2009, Nexylan has expanded to support 1.5 million visitors. Their customers give them a 98% satisfaction rating and 4.9/5 stars for customer service.

In 2021, Nexylan joined the international Total Webhosting Solutions (TWS) group. As part of this group, Nexylan supports primarily French organizations with 100% hosting in France. Over 1,000 servers are hosted in three data centers located in the north of France.

Challenge: DDoS attacks threaten customer website availability and revenue

For Nexylan, the availability of their customers’ sites is a top priority. As a premium managed hosting provider, Nexylan serves organizations whose websites are a critical part of their business.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks can pose a serious threat to the availability of major, highly-visible brands. Before partnering with Cloudflare, Nexylan had encountered several sophisticated DDoS attacks against their clients’ sites.

While Nexylan had DDoS protection in place at the time, it no longer provided the level of protection and availability guarantees that Nexylan wanted to provide to its customers. The previous solution could effectively filter DDoS traffic, but needed to be manually configured to block attack traffic. This reliance on manual responses limited its effectiveness and left Nexylan and their customers more vulnerable to automated and constantly evolving DDoS attacks.

Magic Transit provides critical attack protection and business continuity

For nearly a decade, Nexylan has taken advantage of Cloudflare’s global edge network to improve the responsiveness of their customers’ websites.With Cloudflare Magic Transit, Nexylan immediately perceived this solution as being more suitable and logical to meet the needs of its customers.

Gaetan Allart, Managing Director and Founder at Nexylan, was impressed with Magic Transit from the very start. After carefully scheduling the migration at 5:00 a.m. to minimize disruption, the actual migration process was seamless with no disruption to services.

He said, “We turned it on, and it just worked. The pre-migration checklist from Cloudflare is impressive. It really does check everything. Really nice pre-migration work from Cloudflare made it 100% transparent.”

Cloudflare support gives Nexylan greater flexibility

With Magic Transit, Nexylan has the automated DDoS traffic detection and filtering capabilities that they need to block sophisticated threats against their customers’ sites. However, this improved security is not the only benefit that it brings to the organization.

Allart has always worked with a human-sized team and is usually the lead on managing and resolving higher risk network tasks. With Cloudflare Support, he now can be supported by a team of experts that can help troubleshoot advanced issues with the network.

Nexylan is using Cloudflare Magic Firewall to manage access to its customer sites. Magic Firewall’s intuitive user interface has also enabled Allart to transition some network and security management duties over to other experts of his team.

He says, “In the past, filtering had to be done through complex access-lists across multiple network equipments. Now, it can be all managed through the Cloudflare Dashboard, fill in the form, and press validate. With less risks, more people can now manage security.”

Nexylan’s deployment of Magic Transit has also had a positive impact on the company’s brand image. With Magic Transit managing DDoS protection and BGP advertisements, their network is even more reliable and hosted sites’ availability and resiliency have improved.

Partnering for customer success

Allart asserts that Magic Transit provides an important additional layer of reassurance against DDoS attacks, calling it a “rock-solid network umbrella.” However, the technology is not the only reason why he partners with Cloudflare.

He says, “What we find at Cloudflare is what we want to provide as a service provider to our customers. We both want customers to choose us because we are experts at what we do and want to be partners in our customers’ journey to success.”