Alice Blue

Based in Bangalore, India, Alice Blue is a discount stock broker that offers an online share trading platform for investors to trade stocks and commodities on several major national exchanges. The company also offers depository services through its partnership with Central Depository Services Ltd. The company has been named the Best Broking House in South India, as well as the Best Stock Brokerage Company in the Energy category.

Online security breaches are particularly damaging for financial services organizations like Alice Blue. In addition to lost revenues, frequent outages can damage a company’s reputation, resulting in a loss in consumer confidence and even capital risks.

Challenge: Stop frequent DDoS attacks that were damaging performance and causing outages

Alice Blue was struggling with persistent DDoS attacks, which compromised performance and caused its platform to go down completely an average of twice per month.

“The stock trading industry moves very fast. Every millisecond counts,” explains Nagarjun Ramesh, Alice Blue’s CTO. “Our customers are paying us for this service, and they expect it to be available and working well at all times. In fintech, performance is a major competitive differentiator.”

Alice Blue attempted to mitigate the attacks by deploying a load balancer and content delivery network (CDN), but these measures could not keep up with the number and size of attacks the company was experiencing.

Cloudflare DDoS, WAF, Rate Limiting, and Argo Smart Routing stop DDoS attacks and dramatically improve performance

After starting out with Cloudflare’s free plan, which includes DDoS mitigation and a CDN, Nagarjun saw strong results and found the Cloudflare platform easy to configure. He upgraded to a paid subscription and added Argo Smart Routing — which detects real-time network congestion and routes web traffic across the fastest and most reliable network paths — as well as Cloudflare’s WAF and Rate Limiting offerings.

After Cloudflare, Alice Blue saw immediate improvements. “Cloudflare’s security suite blocks threats.” Nagarjun says. "We went from constant DDoS attacks to none.”

Meanwhile, the addition of Argo Smart Routing dramatically increased the performance of Alice Blue’s platform. "That’s far superior to what our previous performance vendor was able to achieve,” Nagarjun notes.

In addition to stopping DDoS attacks and dramatically enhancing performance, Cloudflare’s reporting and metrics help Alice Blue maintain regulatory compliance in their highly regulated industry.

“We have to provide regulators with a lot of detailed reports and metrics regarding security and availability,” Nagarjun explains. “In addition to helping us maintain compliance by hardening our security and ensuring our platform is reliable, Cloudflare offers reporting features that are a tremendous help during compliance audits. We can access all of the data we need through Cloudflare’s dashboard, instead of having to collate it from different places.”

That said, Nagarjun notes that making his customers happy is just as important as making regulators happy. “We’re the number one broking house in South India, but we want to be number one in the whole country. For that to happen, we have to provide our customers with world-class service. Cloudflare is helping us achieve that.”