Alpargatas

Alpargatas secures and scales their global ecommerce platforms with help from Cloudflare

Alpargatas is a group of globally-recognized consumer brands best known for their iconic Havaianas flip-flops. The Alpargatas Group is headquartered in Brazil, but operates over 40 ecommerce platforms that serve customers around the world, including Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

Challenge: Ensuring performance and security for high-visibility brands

Alpargatas owns many highly-recognizable brands in the consumer goods industry. The success of these brands depends on ensuring a positive user experience for customers around the world.

“At Alpargatas, we are committed to delight the world with amazing brands, brands that convey lightness and joy to the everyday lives of our consumers,” says Felipe Bonomo, Executive Manager of Information Security and Privacy at Alpargatas.

Serving a global customer base across multiple ecommerce channels requires solutions that ensure that user traffic is quickly routed to the appropriate platform. Additionally, Alpargatas needs to protect their highly-visible brands against fraud and other potential security threats

Workers and caching ensure application performance and reliability

Cloudflare’s global network is essential to ensure the availability and performance of Alpargatas’ ecommerce platforms. With over 330 locations worldwide, the Cloudflare network is uniquely positioned to protect Alpargatas’ ecommerce platforms and help Alpargatas provide a better connectivity experience to their customer base.

Alpargatas uses Cloudflare Workers and Argo Smart Routing to manage and improve routing across their complex infrastructure.

“At Alpargatas, we use Workers to manage access to our ecommerce solutions around the globe,” Bonomo says. “With Workers, we can precisely manage traffic without harming application performance or the user experience.”

Cloudflare WAF and Bot Management block targeted attacks

Alpargatas manages high-visibility brands, including Havaianas and Rothys, a sustainable, North American footwear brand. These are common targets for cyber attacks designed to disrupt services or engage in fraudulent activities against the company.

Often, these attacks involve using malicious bots to purchase and resell goods, deplete inventory, or perform credential stuffing attacks against customer accounts.

“In Brazil, there are many specialized groups engaging in fraudulent activities,” Bonomo adds. “Using Cloudflare to mitigate these risks with the Bot Management solution is one of the main benefits we see for Alpargatas.”

Simplification and centralization enhance security efficiency

Managing security across over 40 global ecommerce platforms can be a complex job. According to Bonomo, Cloudflare’s usability and centralized management are key to the scalability of Alpargatas’ security operations.

“It's very easy to manage Cloudflare's products, enabling scalable security without unnecessary complexity,” he says. “The interface is intuitive and makes it easy to customize rules and implement new rules and filters.”

Cloudflare’s diverse product catalog was also a major selling point for Alpargatas. As the company engages in a digital transformation initiative to adapt to Industry 4.0 and 5G networks, centralizing key network security capabilities in a single solution helps them streamline their security operations and scale their business with ease.