Zalando

Zalando implements Magic Transit to enhance security, optimize performance, and ensure fast, accurate customer fulfillment

Fashion ecommerce in Europe is growing nearly five times faster than the fashion industry overall and is projected to reach €130B in revenue by 2024. As Europe’s leading online fashion platform, with annual revenues of €8 billion, Berlin-based Zalando is disrupting the highly competitive online fashion industry. Zalando’s more than 46 million active customers can browse an extensive collection of clothing, shoes, beauty products, and accessories from over 4500 international brands, sold across 23 countries. While the bulk of its sales are online, the company also operates 12 (and counting) brick-and-mortar outlet retail stores in Germany.

Challenge: Protect an internal network that is critical to customer fulfillment operations

Zalando’s enterprise network connects their fulfillment centers, the fashion store, outlet retail locations, and company headquarters. If their network were to go offline, a cascade of problems could ensue. Warehouse workers would be left idle until the problem is fixed, causing fulfillment backlogs and electronic communications between fulfillment centers, outlet retail stores, and the company headquarters would come to a halt, further impeding customer service.

In early November 2020, DDoS attacks were gaining momentum and quickly increasing in frequency and intensity, and the fact that the holiday shopping season was rapidly approaching, convinced Zalando that they needed a proactive and robust network security solution for their enterprise network to prevent possible outages.

Cloudflare helps Zalando maintain a world-class customer experience through the holiday season and beyond

Zalando 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.

Cloudflare adds an additional layer of security to Zalando’s network while improving performance and availability, ensuring that customer orders are fulfilled quickly and accurately. It also enhances productivity and reduces operational costs by freeing up engineers to work on continuously enhancing the customer experience instead of mitigating DDoS attacks.

“Cloudflare Magic Transit is a ‘set it and forget it’ DDoS solution, which is exactly what we needed. We’re a busy team, and we don’t have time for a tool that requires constant oversight,” explains Santiago Serra, Network Architect.

Cloudflare blocks an average of 200 potential attacks each week. In fact, Cloudflare’s automated protection thwarts attacks before Zalando is even aware of them!

Security analytics and performance tools bundled with Magic Transit are a value-add

Cloudflare has simplified how Zalando routes traffic through their network by enabling the company to offload traffic completely to Cloudflare. Additionally, Cloudflare provides valuable analytics — such as availability on different hops and inbound traffic patterns — that Zalando has integrated with its other security tools.

"What's great is that all of Cloudflare's services work hand-in-glove with each other and can be managed from the same dashboard," says Zalando engineering manager Guillermo Cotone.

Cloudflare ensures that Zalando is not only protected from attacks, but can provide a best-in-class experience for their loyal customer base — all without placing extra burden on their internal teams.

“We’re focused on automation, standardization, and resiliency so that we can grow in an orderly and secure fashion. Cloudflare helps us ensure the resiliency of our internal network,” Serra adds.

With Cloudflare protection in place, Zalando can tackle their ambitious growth plans with confidence. The company can scale as rapidly and as much as they wish while maintaining the world-class customer service the Zalando brand is known for.