Dewaweb

Cloudflare Magic Transit gives Dewaweb continuous real-time protection against frequent DDoS attacks

Dewaweb provides over 55,000 Indonesian businesses with cloud-based web hosting services like domains, cloud hosting, cloud server (VPS), cloud backup, SSL certificates, and managed services. Dewaweb’s customers range from small and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises, which span both the public and private sectors. Dewaweb is ISO 27001 certified and provides its customers with 24/7 support and a 100% uptime SLA.

Challenge: Find a smarter, faster way to mitigate frequent DDoS attacks

Dewaweb had been using an in-house solution to detect DDoS attacks, a process which was very time-consuming and ineffective. The situation reached its peak when Dewaweb began experiencing more frequent DDoS attacks when the COVID-19 pandemic started. Engineers had to spend a lot of time mitigating the attacks and communicating with affected customers, who were upset because their sites were either very slow or taken offline completely.

“Mitigating the attacks would take hours, sometimes days, which harmed both our internal productivity and our reputation,” recalls Edy Budiman, CEO. “We needed a smarter, faster way of mitigating these attacks.”

After evaluating several hardware-based DDoS solutions, Dewaweb chose Cloudflare Magic Transit, a cloud-based solution that uses Cloudflare’s global network to protect entire IP subnets from DDoS attacks while also accelerating network traffic.

Magic Transit provides always-on, real-time protection against even the largest, most complex DDoS attacks

Shortly after deploying Magic Transit in March 2021, Dewaweb experienced a DDoS attack (400 Mbps), which Magic Transit stopped almost instantly.

Magic Transit has continued to protect Dewaweb since. Three months post deployment, Magic Transit has mitigated 10.22B packets from 2,575 attacks.

By helping Dewaweb mitigate DDoS attacks that could impact systems availability and reliability, Magic Transit helps the company maintain both its SLA and its ISO 27001 certification. In addition to requiring organizations to dedicate adequate resources to security, ISO 27001 requires that organizations ensure that their systems remain online and available to users.

“Magic Transit is far more cost-effective than hardware-based DDoS solutions, which require a lot of upfront expense and ongoing costs for power consumption and administrative overhead,” Edy says.

Edy raves about Magic Transit’s simplicity and how quickly it mitigates attacks. “Magic Transit is plug-and-play. We don’t have to spend time maintaining it,” he says. “Because it uses Cloudflare’s Anycast network to mitigate DDoS attacks at the edge, it stops attacks quickly.”

Magic Transit also allows Dewaweb’s engineers to focus on enhancing the company’s existing services and developing new ones instead of monitoring and mitigating attacks.

“Before Magic Transit, our NOC team had to stand by and be on-call constantly,” Edy recalls. “We finally have peace of mind, knowing that our network is continuously protected against any kind of L3/L4 DDoS attacks.” Better yet, now Dewaweb’s team can view DDoS attacks that are automatically blocked by Magic Transit in real-time right from the Cloudflare dashboard.

Many companies in Indonesia — particularly non-technical firms that Dewaweb is helping get online for the first time — are unaware of the threat that DDoS attacks pose and how important it is to protect against them. For this reason, Dewaweb sees their use of Magic Transit as a key selling point.

“Our partnership with Cloudflare is highly strategic, and is focused on user education and product integration,” he says. “We also want to integrate Cloudflare into a new security-as-a-service solution aimed at the enterprise market.”

Dewaweb also wants to expand its use of Cloudflare solutions in-house. “Dewaweb is a cloud-based company with a distributed workforce. Many of our team members currently work from home because of the pandemic,” Edy explains. “Cloudflare’s cloud-based tools are a much better fit for us than on-prem solutions.”