RTE

RTE is Ireland’s national public-service media organization – on television, radio, online and mobile. Their mission is to deliver the most-trusted, independent, Irish news service, accurate and impartial, for the connected age. They reflect Ireland’s cultural and regional diversity and enable public access to major events.

RTÉ’s Challenge: Protecting Their Trusted Reputation and Serving the News 24/7

Being Ireland's most trusted news source, RTÉ has a responsibility to serve news to the people. This can be challenging, when there are malicious actors who want to take their site down. Michael Kennedy, Technology Infrastructure Manager at RTÉ, explained "We’re the most trusted source for news and current affairs content. In the event of an attack that took us offline, not only would it be embarrassing for the company, but it would upset the audience. People rely on RTÉ for news and current events." Kennedy continued, "We had experienced a few small scale attacks in the last few years, none of which caused any impact on production services. However, the scale of these issues was growing: In December 2015 the BBC suffered a DDoS related outage, followed in January with numerous attacks against various Irish websites, including government sites. In a year with significant sporting events, a general election and the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising we needed to take measures to protect our services because we knew our current resources would not keep our sites online."

RTÉ's Solution: Easy to Deploy, Advanced Web Security

RTÉ ultimately chose to enlist Cloudflare's internet security services. As Kennedy puts it, "We chose Cloudflare because other vendors are less featured, more complicated to use, and significantly more expensive. With Cloudflare we can deploy website changes easily and extremely rapidly. We can turn on features incrementally, getting basic protection on day one, while being able to turn on new features over time. Plus, when we need to turn on a feature it happens almost instantly, other providers took an hour or more. With no work required on our infrastructure we are able to support HTTP/2, and end-to-end TLS encryption. Cloudflare's interface is simple and intuitive, which makes it trivial to get new users to manage rules. And finally, the service is very affordable."

"We chose Cloudflare because other vendors are less featured, more complicated to use, and significantly more expensive. With Cloudflare we can deploy website changes easily and extremely rapidly..."

Cloudflare's security is not only easy to use and affordable, but it also fits RTÉ's requirements perfectly. "Having not seen a DDoS since signing up, we are very happy." Kennedy stated, "Knowing that in the event of a DDoS we can rapidly increase the protection level, or change page rules, gives us significant assurance that we can keep our public facing services online no matter what."