Squiz

Squiz secures and simplifies a high-performance enterprise Digital Experience Platform on the Cloudflare edge

Squiz is an AI-powered Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provider, with offices in multiple locations globally, including the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Designed to minimize complexity, the Squiz DXP makes it easy for marketers and developers to build, manage, and optimize intelligent enterprise websites, portals, and app experiences.

Squiz offers multiple AI-bolstered capabilities built into the platform, including content management, search, personalization, optimization, visual page building and forms built using drag and drop functionality. Delivered via a composable architecture, the platform also allows seamless integration with existing martech systems.

Since 1998, Squiz has been embraced by a growing number of public and private sector organizations. Its diverse customer list now covers various industries, including government, higher education, and professional services.

Challenge: Balancing performance, security, and simplicity

For Squiz, composability is the key to creating a functional, effective, and easy-to-use DXP solution.

“Composability — the ability to take all types of files, media, and players (whether new or legacy tech) and interconnect and integrate them under a singular platform — is the heart of what we do,” explains Martin Pretorius, IT strategist and Head of Security at Squiz. “By abstracting complexity and simplifying the digital asset management process, Squiz delivers the best possible experience regardless of the state of our clients’ legacy media.”

However, as Squiz helped their clients navigate the complexities of managing vast, often fragmented libraries of digital assets, the company faced its own set of challenges. Keeping pace with growing consumer expectations and the rapid evolution of digital and interactive media technology placed increasing strain on the company’s legacy infrastructure. As they shifted to the cloud to modernize and maintain their competitive edge, Squiz sought a technical partner to help drive improvement in these core areas:

• Ensuring faster, smoother digital experiences for end users, especially during traffic spikes
• Protecting customer applications from vulnerabilities, bot attacks, and DDoS threats
• Helping customers with legacy collateral and toolsets reduce complexity and transition securely — without losing valuable digital assets

“Most of our stakeholders had already had positive experiences with Cloudflare,” says Pretorius. “So, when we decided to partner with industry experts to provide the best possible customer experience, Cloudflare was the obvious choice.”

Solution: Scaling to meet demand and improving performance on the Cloudflare global network

As Squiz moved their legacy servers into the cloud to improve performance and augment their customers’ ability to deliver flawless digital experiences. They also adopted Cloudflare performance services. The first priority was to accelerate customer applications, improve media delivery, and ensure the availability of their customers' digital properties.

Leveraging Cloudflare’s enterprise-grade content delivery network (CDN) — spanning over 330 cities and 120 countries across Cloudflare’s global network — enabled Squiz to host and deliver customer content closer to the end user, reduce latency, improve page load times, and ensure faster, smoother digital experiences.

“Cloudflare delivered the performance we were looking for, pushing our products and packages into the future and helping us get our clients closer to their customers on the network edge,” says Pretorius.

Streamlining development with Workers and Workers KV, a natural evolution

With their initial performance goals met, Squiz moved beyond static content performance enhancements. They implemented Cloudflare Workers — a cornerstone of the Cloudflare developer platform — to run their dynamic workloads at the edge of the global network and automatically scale applications to their distributed customer base.

“The more trips you have to make from the customer to where you generate dynamic content, the less performant the overall experience,“ explains Pretorius. “We were already hosting static content on the Cloudflare global network, so using Workers to render and deliver dynamic content from the edge was a natural evolution.”

Squiz also uses Workers to tailor their clients’ digital experiences and distribute video, audio, and images to both mobile and desktop devices much more efficiently.

“Improving the user experience has always been our goal — and Cloudflare lets us serve static and dynamic content separately, picking the best way to deliver every element on the page,” says Pretorius. “Those benefits accumulate so that every instance is another performance gain.”

Squiz’s developers also use Workers KV, Cloudflare’s serverless key-value application storage, to extend application functionality and reduce response times by caching authentication tokens and other important information on the Cloudflare network.

“We have become quite dependent on Workers KV,” says Pretorius. “It provides such a secure, convenient place to store credentials and critical application data that our developers took it up immediately and never looked back.”

In addition to the performance benefits, developing with the Cloudflare developer platform and Workers KV helps streamline Squiz’s workflows, eliminates redundancies, and enables faster deployment of secure, scalable solutions.

“Cloudflare is a time-saver because we no longer need to write or maintain multiple code instances,” says Pretorius. “Keeping our design and development process consistent and repeatable with Cloudflare, we only need to learn once. For our developers, that is life-changing.”

Cloudflare application services provide manageable, multi-organizational security at scale

While performance is a key driver at Squiz, security is also critical. To shield customers from Internet-borne attacks, the company augments its service portfolio with Cloudflare application services. Available as a managed service to all Squiz customers, the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects customer applications from vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection. Similarly, Cloudflare Bot Management reduces malicious traffic, and Cloudflare DDoS Protection ensures uninterrupted service even during attacks. Cloudflare powers these enhancements using a single, centralized control surface, intelligent automated processes, and rapid remote configurability via infrastructure as code (IAC).

“We generate Cloudflare zones for everything and maintain a unique WAF implementation and rulesets for every customer that asks,” says Pretorius. “We take on that complexity so our clients don’t have to, but it is Cloudflare’s manageability that makes it possible for us to offer a world-leading security solution to our clients at scale.”

Illustrating the added value Cloudflare helps Squiz provide, Pretorius recalls an enterprise client facing a high volume of automated bot traffic. At the client’s request, Squiz implemented Cloudflare Bot Management, immediately reducing the barrage of malicious requests against their origin servers.

“It was a double win,” says Pretorius. “Using Cloudflare we not only reduced bandwidth consumption and increased the performance of their origin servers, we also secured their applications and web infrastructure against harm.”

Looking to the future: How Squiz uses Cloudflare to simplify operations, support legacy systems, and facilitate compliance

Cloudflare is also instrumental in helping Squiz achieve the composability of their clients value. With Cloudflare, Squiz consolidates security, performance, and connectivity services, ensuring that legacy client assets remain accessible and protected against modern threats.

“Cloudflare helps us provide more functionality with less tooling,” says Pretorius. “With Cloudflare integrated into the Squiz platform, every one of our customer organizations has immediate access to powerful, integrated performance and security features.”

For Squiz’s enterprise and government clients and industries, having access to Cloudflare technology provides built-in protections that can help facilitate regulatory compliance without the need to onboard additional security solutions.

Looking ahead, Squiz plans to expand its edge capabilities and explore even more ways to move dynamic content closer to its end users. The company also continues to develop low-code and no-code solutions to empower customers to create and deploy digital experiences without introducing human errors.

“With Cloudflare in the mix, we are exactly where we want to be — closer and closer to each new development goal,” says Pretorius. “It goes beyond the typical client-vendor relationship — we have a really good team supporting us. Day or night, if we need help, Cloudflare answers.”