Telus

Telus strengthens security and improves digital experiences while eliminating legacy IT complexity with Cloudflare

TELUS is growing rapidly. Headquartered in Canada, TELUS Corporation is a dynamic, world-leading global communications technology company with more than 19 million customer connections across wireline, wireless, Internet, security, entertainment and TV services. The company is also expanding into new verticals, including health technology, agricultural technology, energy, and smart home technology.

To succeed in highly competitive markets, TELUS technology leaders are focused on building a world-class engineering organization. That team is responsible for developing innovative products and delivering outstanding digital experiences to customers across Canada and beyond.

Defending a high-value target while facing IT complexity

Among other technology investments, TELUS is currently migrating key workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud. “Moving to the cloud creates great opportunities for accelerating our pace and improving the quality of our services,” says Steve Tannock, director of platform at TELUS.

However, the cloud migration and other initiatives also have the potential for amplifying security challenges by expanding the company’s attack surface. “TELUS is a high-value target for attackers,” says Tannock. “In particular, the volume, quality, and sophistication of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are always increasing. Addressing those threats is a high priority.”

Another challenge was a heterogeneous IT and security environment — which stemmed in part from the company’s growth through acquisitions. “Initially, we had very piecemeal, uneven protection. Every team, every application and every surface had its own solutions,” says Tannock. “Some of those solutions were delivered as physical appliances that were no longer relevant to a cloud approach.”

The complexity of this security environment slowed incident responses and even affected retention of employees. “We were seeing an increased number of DDoS attacks that were not mitigated. As a result, our team was spending lots of time on call, which was stressful and led to burnout,” says Tannock. “We needed to completely rethink how we were protecting the company.”

Strengthening security and consolidating tools with Cloudflare

To transform their security strategy, TELUS began working with Cloudflare. The team implemented DDoS protection and bot management capabilities to stop attacks and prevent malicious bot activity. TELUS also deployed Cloudflare Advanced Certificate Management to secure applications with TLS certificates while avoiding manual administration. Meanwhile, the Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN) helps deliver exceptional experiences to users everywhere.

The move to Cloudflare was widely appreciated by the TELUS team. “Many of our team members had used Cloudflare with previous companies,” says Tannock. “When we decided to make the move to Cloudflare at TELUS, we were all excited to work with a company that has prioritized strong engineering. We are closely aligned with Cloudflare’s engineering-first culture.”

Because Cloudflare offers a single, unified connectivity cloud, the TELUS team immediately recognized the opportunity to consolidate security tools. “Consolidation helps us be lighter and faster,” says Tannock. “We can be more responsive to issues. And at the same time, with fewer tools to manage, we’re reducing our team’s cognitive load.”

Eliminating C$11.8 million in direct costs over three years

Consolidating security tools is having a tangible impact on costs. “With our previous security providers, we had experienced increasing costs and diminishing returns,” says Tannock. “By moving to Cloudflare, we anticipate reducing direct costs by C$11.8 million over three years. That is a massive savings for us.”

TELUS is also driving down operational costs by reducing the need for staff overtime. “In the first five months of this year, we saved more than a hundred hours of overtime compared with previous years,” says Tannock. “That’s both a cost reduction and an improvement in quality of life for our teams. It’s really a tremendous win.”

Spending less time on urgent incidents and more time on strategic priorities

With Cloudflare security capabilities in place, the TELUS team automatically mitigates many more attacks than before — reducing the time to handle attacks by 95% for one high-traffic event. “Two years ago on Black Friday, we spent 48 hours just putting out fires,” says Tannock. “This past year, attackers targeted us even more — but Cloudflare automatically mitigated every attack except one. For the remaining attack, we stopped it within an hour just by quickly adding a configuration rule.”

Increased visibility helps the TELUS team handle threats before they escalate. “Using the Cloudflare dashboard, we can easily see where the problems are and rapidly configure new rules to monitor or block a threat,” says Tannock. “Cloudflare has really transformed the way we work. Now we can spend more of our time working on strategic projects.”

Enhancing customer experiences by delivering better performance

While TELUS is using Cloudflare security capabilities to address threats, the Cloudflare network helps deliver better digital experiences for websites and apps. “We’re always thinking about our customer experiences,” says Tannock. “When we added Cloudflare to our website, we immediately saw a 1.4-second improvement in page response time, which is huge for us — and a very noticeable improvement for our customers.”

On average, the move to Cloudflare has contributed to a 65% reduction in page load times so far. Tannock’s team anticipates another 40% reduction in the future. “Our goal is for all of our properties to load in under two seconds,” says Tannock. “Two years ago, we were averaging about 10 seconds. Now it’s about three-and-a-half seconds. We think we can reach our goal with Cloudflare.”

The TELUS team hopes to achieve that performance goal by moving apps to the edge. “We’re exploring ways to use Cloudflare Workers to serve apps closer to users,” says Tannock. “Canada is a large country, and we want to make sure that customers have responsive experiences whether they are on the West Coast, East Coast, or somewhere in between. With Cloudflare, we’re rethinking how we deliver our software so we can provide a much faster experience for customers everywhere.”

Securing a distributed workforce and enabling continued innovation

The TELUS team has also been investigating a Zero Trust security approach to better protect employees, whether they are working in corporate offices, retail locations, call centers, or elsewhere. “TELUS has a globally distributed workforce, and we need to ensure that we can safeguard employees and provide the right levels of network access,” says Tannock. “We believe that the Cloudflare connectivity cloud will be instrumental in empowering our global employees while maintaining tight security. We can continue to deliver exceptional service and develop innovative products from anywhere.”