Our World in Data
A Case Study on Our World in Data
Our World in Data is a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing the research and data necessary to understand the world’s most pressing challenges—from poverty and disease to climate change and international development.
Acting as a long-term complement to the daily news cycle, the organization provides a "big picture" perspective by tracking progress and persistent obstacles over decades rather than days. As a high-traffic resource for academics, journalists, and the public, Our World in Data needed to scale to ensure global accessibility for its 15,000+ interactive charts while maintaining a secure, cost effective infrastructure. By joining Project Galileo, they have leveraged Cloudflare’s edge computing and security tools to transform their website into a platform that serves as a neutral, "single source of truth" for global statistics.
"We try to be a complement to the daily news where the daily news often focuses on what happened since yesterday... we try to take a step back and say, 'What happened over the last couple of decades? What might happen over the next couple of decades?'" — Daniel Bachler, Head of Engineering
Cloudflare Products & Impact
Our World in Data utilizes a suite of Cloudflare technologies to bridge the gap between static content and dynamic, user-specific data visualization.
- Cloudflare Workers: Workers allow the organization to run serverless code at the edge. While the site is primarily a static artifact for speed and security, Workers enables dynamic elements, such as generating custom social media preview images that reflect the exact filters and timeframes a user has selected on a chart.
- Cloudflare Tunnel: This creates a secure "pipe" between Our World in Data’s internal origin servers and the Cloudflare network. It allows staff to access admin tools securely from anywhere without a traditional VPN, keeping the "front door" to their infrastructure locked to unauthorized users.
- WAF (Web Application Firewall): Cloudflare’s WAF provides a robust layer of protection against application-layer attacks. For Our World in Data, this is a critical defense against unusual attack scenarios where malicious actors might attempt to compromise the website to manipulate data points that influence prediction markets or public opinion.
- DDoS Mitigation: By sitting behind Cloudflare’s global network, the organization is shielded from distributed denial-of-service attacks that could otherwise take their research offline. This ensures that their data remains accessible to the public, even during periods of intense global interest or targeted traffic spikes.
Protecting the Neutrality of Data
For Our World in Data, cybersecurity is about more than just staying online; it is about protecting the integrity of the information that shapes global policy. Daniel Bachler notes that while the organization works differently than traditional investigative journalists, their role as a neutral data source introduces unique risks. As the organization’s data has been used in the past in academic papers and prediction markets, the incentive for malicious actors to "hack the website so that it would say the wrong thing in the crucial moment" could grow.
By offloading the heavy lifting of security and hosting to Cloudflare, the engineering team can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.
"It’s definitely very nice for us now with the setup with Cloudflare that we don’t have to worry about this... [the site stays up] because it’s Cloudflare," says Bachler, Head of Engineering
This peace of mind allows them to continue their mission where data is open, accessible, and, above all, trusted.
