Cloudflare, Inc., a company renowned for its contributions to building a safer, faster, and more dependable Internet, has announced a significant expansion within its collaboration with IBM Cloud Internet Services (CIS).
The collaboration, fueled by Cloudflare’s expertise, now encompasses the integration of Cloudflare Bot Management into CIS’s array of services. This addition, available to enterprises subscribed to the Enterprise Premier Plan, is designed to empower businesses in countering the escalating menace of malicious bot-driven traffic.
The longstanding partnership between Cloudflare and IBM Cloud dates back to 2018. During this time, the two entities have seamlessly integrated Cloudflare’s solutions for application security and performance directly into IBM Cloud via the platform of IBM CIS, which is powered by Cloudflare.
- Through the new offering, CIS empowers its customers to configure their web and Internet applications with advanced protection against cyber threats, including safeguarding against DDoS attacks and data breaches.
Through the new offering, CIS empowers its customers to configure their web and Internet applications with advanced protection against cyber threats, including safeguarding against DDoS attacks and data breaches.
The protection is further complemented by performance and reliability enhancements such as load balancing, optimized routing and caching, as well as streamlined data exchange, all encapsulated within the comprehensive suite of capabilities that CIS provides.
The augmentation of Cloudflare Bot Management within this collaboration is a strategic response to the mounting challenge posed by malevolent bots. These entities are increasingly consuming resources and overwhelming organisations, with estimates from Forrester Research indicating that they contribute to at least a quarter of all Internet traffic.
Additionally, the evolving landscape has prompted bot management providers to expand their offerings beyond their traditional focus on areas like ad fraud, identity fraud, and application security.
The modern requirement for bot management tools involves the ability to adapt to ever-evolving attack methods, furnish a variety of readily available and customizable reports, and facilitate smooth and frictionless business transactions for end customers.
The rising sophistication of malicious bot attacks, coupled with the growing complexities of manual mitigation, has underscored the need for dynamic and adaptive solutions for enterprises operating with public-facing workloads on the Internet.
Cloudflare Bot Management addresses this need head-on, affording businesses protection against targeted application abuses such as credential stuffing, inventory hoarding, carding abuse, and content scraping. This comprehensive approach to bot management, encompassing detection and mitigation, is available to all IBM Cloud CIS customers with an active Enterprise Premier Plan.
Matt Harrell, Global Head of Channels and Alliances at Cloudflare, emphasized the significant role Cloudflare and IBM CIS play in facilitating the expansion of Internet-facing business applications.
He highlighted that while the landscape is witnessing a surge in such applications, it’s equally witnessing a rise in bot-related activities.
These activities, including malicious ones, pose substantial risks, creating inefficiencies across businesses ranging from fraudulent transactions to deceptive purchasing attempts, ultimately affecting a business’s financial bottom line and potentially exposing it to data losses.
Nataraj Nagaratnam, Fellow, CTO, Cloud Security at IBM, reinforced the notion that amidst the expanding threat landscape, it’s paramount to continually evolve solutions to bolster clients’ cyber resilience efforts.
“As the threat landscape continues to grow, it’s more important than ever to evolve our offerings to better support our clients in their cyber resiliency journey,” said Nataraj Nagaratnam,
“Both IBM and Cloudflare continue to have a mission of delivering solutions that will address costly security threats, without hindering Internet speed or business innovation,”
We aim to provide our clients a single integrated solution that offers both industry-leading protection and accelerated performance.”
New Offering Benefits – Cloudflare Bot Management
As one of the largest and most interconnected networks in the world, Cloudflare is able to derive deep insights from analysing a wide range of traffic. Cloudflare Bot Management delivers the following for customers:
- Identify malicious bots through effective machine learning:
Cloudflare Bot Management is trained on hundreds of billions of requests per day, with Cloudflare’s machine learning creating a bot score for every request running through its network. The solution automatically filters out content scraping and site crawling as well as inventory hoarding and credit card stuffing. - Reduce risk through fingerprinting:
Cloudflare leverages fingerprinting from millions of diversified Internet properties to accurately classify bots but does not generate or store device fingerprints, eliminating risk to user privacy. - Gain enhanced behavioral analysis of types of Internet traffic:
Analysed behavior and detection of anomalies in an organization’s specific traffic, across all their Internet properties, provides another level of business insight.
CIS has customers across a range of industry verticals, geographic regions, and specialist groups building unique service offerings.
“With the rise of DDoS attacks and data theft, it’s become important to have support that helps us meet the challenges of the ever-changing threat landscape,”
“That’s why at Liquid Reply, we called on IBM Cloud and Cloudflare to help support our security initiatives,” said Davide Sarais, IT Lead at Liquid Reply.
“By using IBM Cloud Internet Services, we’ve been able to maintain our compliance posture. The new features that are available to IBM and Cloudflare clients are exciting advancements that we hope will take our approach to security to the next level.” he said.
Dave Giunta, VP of Engineering at Home Chef. said, “I’ve worked in Software Engineering for 15 years. I’ve never seen page load times improve as site traffic increased, but Cloudflare Bot Management helped make that happen,”
Since 2018, Cloudflare has been collaborating with IBM CIS to implement features that address critical Internet security challenges while delivering performance and reliability across business applications.
CIS also has customers across a range of industry verticals, geographic regions, and specialist groups building unique service offerings.
Cloudflare was awarded by Reuters Events for Global Responsible Business in 2020, named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2021, and ranked among Newsweek’s Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022.
