Namely

Cloudflare augments modern HR platform provider's Google Workspace defenses to stop phishing

This video features Robert Hooper, Senior Manager of IT in Security at Namely

Tell us about yourself and your company.

Rob Hooper: I'm Rob Hooper. I'm the senior manager of IT in Security at Namely. Namely creates an all-in-one HR payroll and benefits platform for small-to-medium businesses. Our mission is to help companies create better work spaces through a modern HR stack.

What email security challenges were you facing?

Rob Hooper: Before Cloudflare, Namely was drawing the stock filtering in Gmail to secure inboxes. Google does a good job handling spam, but phishing emails for our support teams was a big problem. It's critical for us to deliver every single valid email from our clients to our support teams. However, we also have to make sure to filter out all the malicious content that could put our clients at risk. You know, that's an especially tricky challenge for a managed payroll provider, because the content of the email that we receive would look suspicious in any other circumstances. For example, it would be common for us to receive emails from a non-Namely address saying, “Help, I can't run payroll”. Obviously, it was a difficult challenge and we knew that. And we also knew that most traditional anti phishing tools weren't equipped for the task.

Why did you choose Cloudflare?

Rob Hooper: Our CTO at the time recommended we check out Cloudflare because he had heard good things from leaders at other companies. After a quick POC, we were impressed with Cloudflare’s ultra-high signal-to-noise ratio, its flexible remediation options, and integrations that it offered.

How did Cloudflare improve your security program?

Rob Hooper: We were able to deploy Cloudflare as a transparent layer of protection on top of our existing email service, with zero downtime. This allows us to better secure inboxes without having the employees needing to know anything about Cloudflare or change their email habits in any way. As a result, our user-reported phishing investigations were cut by at least half. Since implementation, we've never had to release a falsely convicted email from our admin quarantine. The solution just works. This frees up our time for other proactive activities. Phishing is never going to be a solved problem for us, but since Cloudflare, it's a problem that no longer keeps me up at night.

What would you tell a colleague/peer about Cloudflare?

Rob Hooper: Namely has had a good experience with Cloudflare. The solution is a very good value in terms of the amount of risk it mitigates to the dollars it costs. On top of that, it does its thing while requiring very little of our time and energy to maintain.