Vodacom Business partners with Cloudflare to enhance cyber resilience

The global cybercrime pandemic triggered by COVID-19 may be here to stay making it critical for businesses to ensure they are protected. News reports of the recent local attack of a critical healthcare organisation earlier this month indicates that South African businesses are not exempt, with South Africa seeing a 33% increase in the volume of cyber-attacks since March. 

To continue to support and protect customers, Vodacom Business has partnered with Cloudflare to provide businesses of all sizes, faster, more secure and reliable website services. 

Cybersecurity has become a major concern for organisations of all sizes as protecting devices, networks, client data and apps is an essential component of doing business in today’s digital world. According to the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2020, cyberattacks are ranked as the second risk of greatest concern for business globally over the next 10 years. Cyber risks join environmental risks in terms of high impact and likelihood, with attacks on businesses in several sectors such as finance, energy, healthcare and transportation.

Fast becoming a common type of cyberattack is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks target websites and online services with the goal of overwhelming them with more traffic than the server or network can accommodate. This ultimately renders the website or service inoperable, leading to revenue loss, operational expenses and more importantly damage to a company’s brand.

Digital businesses depend on constant, uninterrupted connectivity. Network and web services availability is crucial to ensuring customer satisfaction, trust and confidence in a brand or business. With new attacks varying in size, duration and persistence, DDoS protection has become an essential part of every business and organization’s online presence.   

“As a leading supplier of telecommunications, infrastructure and enterprise software in South Africa, Vodacom Business’s partnership with Cloudflare ensures that our customers have the best products and solutions available to protect them from today’s increasingly sophisticated online threats,” says Kabelo Makwane, Managing Executive for Cloud, Hosting and Security at Vodacom Business. “Now is not the time to let your guard down. With some businesses going back to their offices but many others still operating via remote working, cyber criminals are gearing up to further attack businesses as they adopt a hybrid model between their corporate network and remote set up.”

Cloudflare offers a diverse set of security, performance, and reliability products that use machine learning to provide actionable and timely insights that help secure and accelerate websites and other Internet properties. These include:

• Proactively defending against cyber attacks
• Providing insights from traffic to a single Internet property that can be applied across Cloudflare’s entire global network to quickly prevent potential cyber attacks
• Blocking malicious traffic by classifying bad traffic using the source IP
• Improving performance by routing traffic intelligently
• Automatic updates to WAF for protecting against new application attacks

Businesses around the globe have been migrating their operations online as digital transformation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) change the business landscape. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this migration with businesses increasing their online presence, moving to cloud hosting and employees working remotely. 

The partnership with Cloudflare will allow Vodacom Business to offer DDoS protection and traffic acceleration for all network infrastructure — whether on-premise, cloud-hosted, or in a hybrid environment. Now more than ever, business networks need to remain secure, fast, and reliable. Cloudflare’s network offers the scale and performance that helps organisations deliver a superior application experience while keeping their environments secure. 

“This solution is vital for internet applications such as websites that collect users’ personal details and require additional security and can be applied by financial institutions, hospitals and any other businesses to ensure their customers’ personal information remains secure,” says Makwane.

No business is exempt from the many risks of cybercrimes, including financial loss, disruption in operations and damage to the business reputation. Vodacom Business continues to provide security products and services to businesses of all sizes, leveraging skilled resources and cutting-edge technology to secure IT systems and networks.