The internet can be a scary place. Among a web of unregulated content, you want your site to be as secure as possible. That’s where we come in—with the help of Cloudflare! Here’s a little more about why we use Cloudflare for website security—and what it means for your digital assets when you work with us.
What exactly is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a cloud service providing (among other things) CDN, web application firewall, DDoS protection, and managed DNS services. In other words, their services make websites that use its platform faster, more secure, and more reliable.
Cloudflare is one of the leaders in the web security space. According to their website, they are “one of the world’s largest cloud network platforms.” Their users include some of the largest companies, institutions, and web brands today. These include Discord, IBM, the Library of Congress, Reuters, OkCupid, and many more.
Let’s break it down further
There are four overarching categories that Cloudflare serves to enhance. These include performance, security, reliability and insight, as outlined on Cloudflare’s website. Under the umbrella of those categories, it seeks to:
- Accelerate internet applications
- Enhance mobile experiences
- Ensure application availability
- Protect against the risk of DDoS attacks
- Prevent customer data breaches
- Block against abusive bots
- Provide a reliable, innovative infrastructure
- Integrate with and augment popular analytics services
Why do we use Cloudflare for website security?
Here at McNutt & Partners, we use various parts of Cloudflare’s services (from security to domain registration) for virtually every website, app, and other service we manage.
We use Cloudflare for web security for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is its world-leading DDoS protection. A DDoS, or distributed denial of service, is a type of attack in which computers and other devices from around the world (often malware-infected “zombies”) flood a server with garbage traffic. They do this in an attempt to render it inaccessible to legitimate users. Cloudflare has enormous network capacity and sophisticated mitigation techniques. This allows them to absorb and discard most DDoS attacks without the performance of the website being affected.
In addition to its DDoS protection, Cloudflare’s web application firewall provides a layer of protection against a wide variety of attacks. These attacks would attempt to inject malicious code into or steal sensitive user data from websites.
The service’s different plan levels allow us to tailor the level of protection to the needs of each site we manage. For many of our websites, Cloudflare’s excellent free plan is exactly what we need. This includes their performance-boosting CDN (content delivery network). Cloudflare’s global CDN caches copies of static files like images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files. It then serves them to end users from locations worldwide, instead of the single source location of the website itself.
Why is website security important?
Security is a critical consideration in all websites and apps in 2019. Not all aspects of security can be shored up with a service like Cloudflare (for example, strong passwords and two-factor authentication for administrative user accounts). However, Cloudflare does form an important part of our defense-in-depth strategy.
Armies of bots and humans with tools are constantly scanning the internet, looking for opportunities to deface websites or inject malicious code to steal user data like credit card information and more. Cloudflare helps protect against those bad actors, sometimes preventing them from even being able to reach the site they’re trying to attack. We value the security and privacy of our clients and every one of their customers, so we use Cloudflare to help protect them.
Summary
The fact that we use Cloudflare for website security means that our clients’ sites remain protected to the best of our ability against the threats of the internet. In what can sometimes seem like the Wild West, we seek to help keep order.
McNutt & Partners is a full-service advertising and digital marketing agency. Contact us today for your marketing needs! Call 334-521-1010, or visit our contact page.
