Computex

Computex enhance its Managed Security offering by adding Cloudflare Magic Transit to protect its clients against DDoS attacks

Computex is a global solutions, cybersecurity, managed security services, and managed services provider with offices throughout North America and customers supported globally. Headquartered in Houston, Computex has been awarded Houston’s #1 cybersecurity company for multiple years by the Houston Business Journal. Through their managed services offering they provide a wide range of services, from managed infrastructure (infrastructure as a service) to Security Operations Center (SOC)-as-a-Service, to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises alike. Computex currently manages 65,000 users and serves over 1,000 companies.

As a large cybersecurity company, their main goal is to protect their customers’ businesses and keep them secure from attacks.

Challenge: DDoS attacks endanger core services

Computex is rapidly expanding, moving from a national footprint to supporting businesses around the world. With this growth comes increased visibility to attackers and the need to protect the services and infrastructure that they host for their customers against cyber threats.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are growing more common and sophisticated. For Computex, a DDoS attack could significantly impact its ability to provide core services to its customers as the company hosts its customers’ infrastructure and provides SSL VPNs to customers.

Cloudflare Magic Transit intelligently mitigates DDoS attacks

Computex previously had a DDoS prevention solution, but it did not meet the needs of the business. The solution required frequent monitoring and configuration changes to protect Computex’s infrastructure against more sophisticated DDoS threats.

For a more sustainable solution, Computex turned to Cloudflare. Oscar Morales, SOC Manager at Computex, says, “I really appreciated the documentation that was provided to us. It was easy to understand what data points Cloudflare needed from us and what we needed to do to ensure that we configured and set up everything correctly and efficiently.”

Computex also saw value in working with the Cloudflare team directly during implementation. “We had a very good experience with Cloudflare,” says Kuoan Lee, Vice President of Infrastructure. “Our account team was on the phone with us every day to help us fine tune and succeed.”

After deploying Magic Transit, Computex no longer needed to constantly monitor and react to protect against evolving DDoS threats. According to Morales, “Cloudflare Magic Transit automatically adapts to threats and mitigates them. It also provides feedback and analytics so that we can make the best decisions as a business.”

For Computex, DDoS attacks were an existential threat to their business. A successful attack could cause the company to miss service-level agreements (SLAs), costing them customers and money. Additionally, a successful attack could carry significant remediation costs in terms of cyber insurance, public relations, and post-incident forensic security assessments.

Magic Transit provides ongoing cost savings and peace of mind to Computex by eliminating the fear of DDoS attacks. Morales says, “This eliminates the need to have resources sitting around and continuously monitor 24/7. It's great to have Cloudflare doing that for us, because I just get a report saying, ‘We mitigated this much DDoS traffic today.’”

Cloudflare Spectrum provides protection against application-layer DDoS attacks

Modern DDoS attacks commonly combine layer 3/4 and layer 7 attacks. Network-level monitoring and DDoS protection are not enough to mitigate these threats. According to Adam Klimko, Sr. Director of Solution Architects at Computex, “Trying to filter out good traffic from bad traffic, just based on origin, is difficult. There just isn't anything unique about any of the packets from good attackers and bad attackers at layer 3 or 4 because attacks happen more at the application layer.”

Computex hosts SSL VPN, DNS, email, and other services for its customers and needs deep visibility into this traffic to detect and filter DDoS traffic. “That's why we enabled Spectrum,” Morales says. Cloudflare Spectrum is a reverse proxy service that protects TCP and UDP applications from DDoS attacks without impairing performance. “Because of the nature of our business and the criticality of those services, it just made sense for us. Otherwise, we weren't using the right tool for the right situations.”

Securing customers with Cloudflare solutions

Computex’s top priority is upholding the responsibility of keeping their customers’ businesses secure and protected, and Faisal Bhutto, President of Cloud & Cybersecurity at Computex, believes providing DDoS protection via Magic Transit and Spectrum is critical to achieving that goal and the ability to deliver to their customers the best of breed solution. He says, “Cloudflare is an intelligent solution that understands your environment and adapts over time. It’s a resilient and comprehensive solution with a team that is invested in supporting their customers through not only the sales cycle, but also through implementation and adoption.”