FCL/Gazeta Esportiva

FCL uses Cloudflare to bring speed and security to its online properties like its sports site Gazeta Esportiva.

FCL is a 70 years old media and communications firm based in Brazil. Their media offerings include FM Radio, TV Broadcast, Sports Publishing and even a communication University. Their website Gazeta Esportiva (gazetaesportiva.com) is a historic sports newspaper that FCL converted to being an online publication. Today Gazeta Esportiva is one of the highest traffic sports websites in Brazil, receiving 6 million visits every month.

“Our main goal is to extend our offline presence to the digital world,” noted David Verzolla, Head of Technology at FCL. “Our company is very traditional, being one of the early pioneers of communications in Brazil we now want to be leaders in the digital space.”

FCL’s Challenge: Digitizing a Tradition of Excellence in Communication

This transition to the digital space meant FCL needed to making their content available online. However, to take FCL’s tradition of excellence online meant reliably delivering high quality content with speed that consumers demand. “We were looking for services that could improve the speed of our website, while also providing a higher level of security,” Verzolla explained.

FCL’s Solution: A Leading Internet Performance and Security Provider

FCL implemented Cloudflare’s CDN, DDoS mitigation and WAF services to bring speed and security to their online properties. Cloudflare’s CDN helps boost the speed of FCL’s sites by leveraging a network of data centers in over 330 cities around the world. With these distributed points of presence FCL’s content is served closer to their end users thereby reducing geographic latency and improving site performance. “We went from having speed issues to having a site over 50% faster,” Verzolla related. “As soon as our site got faster we noticed a definite increase in customer retention.”

FCL also enjoys the comfort of having Cloudflare protect their site. Cloudflare’s DDoS protection has mitigated some of the largest attacks on the Internet, and is constantly bolstered and improved through Cloudflare’s expanding global network. Plus, Cloudflare’s WAF leverages intelligence from millions of Internet properties on the network to have the most up-to-date information to block the latest cyber attacks. “The security features of Cloudflare freed up our developers from worrying about keeping the site online and allowed them to focus on other site improvements.” noted Verzolla.