UK Government Agency

UK Government agency leverages Cloudflare to modernize communications with a solution of significant national importance

A UK Government agency needed a digital platform where users could engage digitally. They partnered with CDS, an agency that enables strategic change in organizations and businesses to create and build better services to meet the evolving needs of customers, employees and citizens.

Challenge: Ensure secure remote access to the solution of national importance and protect it from malicious bots

CDS manages the back end of the platform, including security. Initially, remote access to the solution of national importance by a UK Government agency and CDS employees was protected by firewalls and other internal measures, but these were difficult and time-consuming to manage. CDS didn’t want to use a VPN, because VPNs are complicated to deploy and manage, and difficult for end users to use.

Availability and performance were especially important, as was protecting the platform from high volumes of malicious bot traffic, which would degrade its performance and incur significant bandwidth charges.

Due to previous positive experiences with Cloudflare products, CDS deployed several Cloudflare solutions to address these challenges:

• Access, which enables remote users to securely connect to internal resources
• Bot Management, which uses global threat intelligence and machine learning to block malicious bot traffic
• Tunnel, a secure tunneling solution that establishes a private connection between internal applications and the Cloudflare edge

Cloudflare Access ensures secure remote connections to the solution of national importance platform

CDS was able to configure Cloudflare Access and implement the solution within a few hours.

“We didn’t have a single issue deploying Cloudflare Access, and our clients love how easy it is for them to use,” says CDS. “We feel really lucky that we found Access when we did, which in our experience has proven itself superior to other similar solutions.”

The team working on the platform share Access seats, which enables secure authentication from any modern browser to the web-based solution they have developed. For this use case, end users did not need to install any endpoint software, making deployment straightforward and streamlined.

“Cloudflare Access provided this solution with secure remote access right out of the box,” said a spokesperson from the team at CDS. “It’s very easy for the UK government agency to use, and it takes very little time for CDS to maintain. Once you have Access set up, it just works.”

Cloudflare Bot Management guards the solution against malicious bot attacks, while Tunnel ensures world-class performance

After deploying Cloudflare Bot Management, malicious bot attacks on the platform dropped. This decrease improved site performance, saved money on bandwidth costs, and provided highly detailed security analytics that were previously unavailable. The UK government agency can use these analytics to better understand the types of bot attacks they’re facing.

The Bot Management machine learning engine is amazing, and the analytics provide the client with valuable security data that they can use to implement proactive security measures, such as blocking problematic IP addresses.

CDS also deployed Cloudflare Tunnel to further optimize performance on the platform.

Cloudflare is integral to the success of this UK government platform. As a solution of national importance the platform is required to deliver consistent, secure, high-performance to users.