Quickbutik

Quickbutik secures and supports a rapidly growing ecommerce platform with Cloudflare

Launched in 2015, Quickbutik is a platform that helps small ecommerce businesses grow. The company focuses on providing the right apps and integrating them in a user-friendly way — eliminating the need to spend time on the technical side of running an ecommerce store.

Challenge: Rapid growth causes scalability challenges

Quickbutik is growing rapidly, with over 5,000 ecommerce stores across the Nordic region on its platform. This expanding user base comes with greater overhead expenses and resources, since the company needs to ensure the availability, performance, and security of its customers’ sites. Additionally, the company is increasingly exposed to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other threats.

Quickbutik wanted to focus on improving its platform and customer experience, and ensure it could continue to scale to meet demand. It needed a partner that could eliminate the pain points of scaling and provide enterprise-level security to its customers.

Taking the anxiety out of scaling

The primary scaling challenge that Quickbutik faced was managing its customers’ SSL certificates. The use of TLS for data encryption is essential for compliance with PCI DSS and requires SSL certificates to be deployed and regularly renewed for every ecommerce site’s custom domains. Previously, the company handled SSL certificates in-house using its own proxies and certificate rotation code hosted on AWS infrastructure.

As the number of stores on the Quickbutik platform grew, this infrastructure became more difficult to manage. Hosting over 5,000 ecommerce stores meant that Quickbutik was managing tens of thousands of SSL certificates. In some cases, these certificates required custom rules for rollout or rotation, which added further complexity.

Quickbutik replaced its in-house solution with Cloudflare’s SSL for SaaS, which enables painless certificate generation for their customers’ custom domains. Now, the process for creating certificates for customers’ custom domains, which previously took ten to fifteen minutes, completes in under a minute — a more than 90% improvement.

Simplifying certificate management also allowed Quickbutik to accomplish its goal of focusing more on improving its platform rather than maintaining it. According to Azddin Benberkan, Quickbutik’s founder, “With SSL for SaaS, our engineers can really work on the product now, focusing on the value that we provide rather than platform maintenance. SSL for SaaS provides huge savings of their time and effort.”

Providing enterprise-level security for small ecommerce brands

In the past, Quickbutik used in-house tools to prevent bot traffic and DDoS attacks. However, as the visibility of Quickbutik and its customers grew, larger-scale and more targeted attacks became more of a concern.

The switch to Cloudflare WAF and DDoS Protection have given Quickbutik invaluable visibility into the attacks being performed against its customers’ sites. According to Benberkan, “The DDoS attack numbers in the Cloudflare console are way higher than we saw in our own tools because we detected that as normal traffic.”

Cloudflare solutions block about six million attacks per month against the stores on the Quickbutik platform. Benberkan says, “It is really awesome to be able to provide enterprise-level protection to our customers.”

Implementing Zero Trust remote access with Cloudflare Access

Quickbutik is also looking to Cloudflare to secure its remote workforce.

As an initial response to the pandemic, the company adopted a VPN to enable remote access for employees to internal resources. The VPN, however, has proven “buggy” and “unstable,” with employees encountering latency and losing connection to their tools after they had already authenticated.

Cloudflare Access will enable Quickbutik to depreciate its VPN usage and deliver a more seamless, more performant experience for its employees. In particular, onboarding new members of its growing workforce will require less setup and deployment effort with Access than with the current VPN.

“With Cloudflare Access, we can get people connected and working securely regardless of where they are and how they connect,” says Benberkan.

Plus, unlike a VPN, Access follows default-deny, identity-aware best practices that will enable the organization to improve its security approach.

“Our responsibility is the integrity and safety of the data we see and tools we use to work,” says Benberkan. “Cloudflare helps us ensure that high level of safety.”

Preparing Quickbutik for future growth

Before partnering with Cloudflare, scaling was a significant concern for Quickbutik. Now, that anxiety is gone. Benberkan says, “When you grow, you don’t want the technical details of platform maintenance to get in the way of creating value for your customers. Cloudflare takes away the anxiety of scaling the business and enables us to focus on building new features.”