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Flo, the Leading Women’s Health App, Helps Safeguard Customer Data With Cloudflare

When it comes to securing customer data, there’s nothing that requires more vigilance than personal health. That’s why Flo Health, the leading women’s health app, has made security and privacy core to the company’s mission — and why it chose Cloudflare to provide an extra layer of protection.

Flo is the #1 most popular female health app worldwide, with 250 million total installs and 50 million monthly active users. Security and privacy are paramount to Flo’s core values because its app deals with deeply personal issues like fertility tracking, reproductive goals, and even preemptive disease detection.

“At Flo, we firmly believe that every woman deserves the right to track their health without concern. It is the responsibility of every women's health app to commit to high privacy and security standards, and thanks to Cloudflare's suite of products, we are able to offer a deeper level of protection for our users' data." -Roman Bugaev Chief Technology Officer, Flo

To bolster its security on the network layer, Flo turned to Cloudflare. Flo now has deep insights into the traffic attempting to reach its servers — informed by the vast scale of Cloudflare’s network, operating across 330 cities in 120 countries worldwide.

Tools like Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall and Rate Limiting allow Flo to automatically block malicious traffic flagged by the collective intelligence of Cloudflare’s network — informed by over 25 million Cloudflare customers’ Internet properties. These insights allow Cloudflare to create proprietary WAF rulesets that account for 84.6% of application-layer threats blocked by Cloudflare, resulting in major security gains over the standard OWASP firewall Core Rule Set. And Flo can also deploy its own fine-grained, custom rules to suit its needs.

Flo Health also took advantage of Cloudflare's integration with CrowdStrike to ensure that its employees had secure access to applications from anywhere. Using both product sets, Flo could easily deploy custom rules based on Crowdstrike's ZTA score to ensure only employees with the right device posture got access to sensitive applications. Employees with low ZTA score were either denied access or put in a sandbox enviornment.

In addition to Cloudflare’s security suite, Flo is leveraging Cloudflare to reach a premium subscriber audience with exclusive video content served by Cloudflare Stream. Stream gives Flo a way to manage and deliver video at scale with full control, including a Flo-branded video player. This experience has proven so compelling that Flo’s fans are watching 10 times more video than they were with their previous provider, totaling over 14.5 million minutes watched per month.

“Cloudflare has helped us ensure app reliability and 30% faster response time across all regions. No matter where our users are located — Flo works smoothly on their smartphones thanks to smart traffic routing, and content in the app is now delivered to the user from the closest Cloudflare server.

What is even more important, the partnership with Cloudflare helps us to raise the bar of security standards for women’s health apps, which is absolutely essential for our category. Our users entrust us with their most sensitive data and we are committed to taking every step to ensure that it is protected. Cloudflare provides the solution that enables our app to combat any potential DDoS attacks thanks to layered security approach and multiple DDoS mitigation capabilities.” -Roman Bugaev Chief Technology Officer, Flo

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