Easygo

Easygo drives developer efficiency and enhances security, scalability, and performance with Cloudflare

Easygo is an Australian technology developer best known for Stake, one of the world’s top online casinos and sports betting sites, and KICK, a top international live-streaming and video entertainment platform.

The KICK platform’s creator-first focus and creative partnerships have attracted over 40 million users since its launch in 2022. Showing 8.9% viewer growth monthly, KICK outpaces its streaming industry competitors. Similarly, Stake — one of the industry’s earliest crypto casinos — has disrupted the online gaming ecosystem with its unique, player-centric games and high-visibility marketing collaborations. Currently responsible for 4% of bitcoin traffic globally, Stake went from 5 billion to over 30 billion bets placed in under 12 months.

Easygo drives its innovations, supports rapid growth, and serves millions of users with a 500-person team based at its Melbourne headquarters and an additional 600 employees worldwide.

Providing secure, reliable services during meteoric expansion

Easygo faced growing pains as it began expanding into new markets and transforming from a startup into what Head of IT & Security, Michael McKinnon, calls the company’s “scale-up” phase. There are now over 40 million regular viewers on KICK, and Stake draws 100 million to 200 million monthly visitors. With this rapid growth, bringing global attention to its products and platforms, Easygo needed to pivot from an innovation-driven ethos into a longer-term strategy with a greater focus on security, reliability, and scalability.

"As with many startups, there was a time where development was prioritised over security — we weren’t really on the global radar as a focal point for any major threat activity," explains McKinnon. "However, when we raised our profile and gained millions of community members, everything changed. Alongside our new users, we attracted unwanted attention from bad actors and new threat vectors."

To sustain growth and secure the platform without compromising innovation, performance, or development agility, Easygo reached out to Cloudflare for specialized expertise in the following areas:

Mitigating cybersecurity risks: Shielding the platform from DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and other cyber threats while ensuring uninterrupted service for millions globally Managing traffic and transactional growth: Handling surges in user activity across two high-volume, high-demand online platforms Enhancing developer productivity: Securing and accelerating workflows to maintain a high level of development agility and efficiency

“We work with best-in-class, best-in-industry partners that enable us to concentrate on high-value IP and not get bogged down doing things others can do better,” says McKinnon. “Cloudflare aligned perfectly with those goals. It stood out for its deep engineering culture, history of offering long-term value, and its status as a global organization with world-class technological capabilities.”

Solution: Improving risk posture with Cloudflare

Easygo began its Cloudflare partnership by addressing its growing security concerns, leveraging the Cloudflare security portfolio and application security services to enhance its risk posture and protect customers, and expanding attack surfaces. Its websites, applications, and public and private infrastructure faced DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and other security challenges. With the Cloudflare web application firewall (WAF) and global network providing a secure perimeter, advanced threat intelligence, and threat mitigation at scale, Easygo now confidently safeguards online transactions numbering in the billions.

“Besides millions of daily interactions on KICK, Stake represents a significant percentage of all transactions on the blockchain," says McKinnon. "With Stake, protecting the house is our priority — at scale, any security incident could result in significant losses. Cloudflare gives us the intuition to anticipate problems and provides the solutions to neutralize them.”

Accelerating applications and streamlining service delivery on the Cloudflare global network

Easygo also relies on Cloudflare web performance services to accelerate applications, streamline service delivery, and ensure KICK and Stake provide an uninterrupted customer experience. With coverage from data centers in over 330 cities across 120 countries, Cloudflare allows Easygo to scale effortlessly during transactional peaks and traffic surges caused by high-demand promotions and popular online events. Critical to the success of the company’s live streaming and online gaming applications, the Cloudflare global network connects Easygo to any of its users worldwide in 50 milliseconds or less.

“Cloudflare provides our users and other high-value traffic with speed, stability, reliability, and an excellent customer experience,” says McKinnon. “As we continue to expand into global markets and our customer base and transaction numbers reach 10x or even 100x, Cloudflare gives us the ability to efficiently spread system loads globally, across each region.”

The resilience and capacity of the Cloudflare global network are central to Easygo’s growth strategy, providing support as its platforms continue their rapid expansion.

“We know we can rely on Cloudflare to solve problems we are not in a position to solve ourselves — at the pace that we’re scaling, that’s crucial to our success,“ McKinnon adds.

Modernizing access to internal apps and replacing a legacy VPN

Easygo has also adopted Cloudflare to simplify how employees access internal systems and applications. Previously, Easygo relied on traditional VPN and bastion servers, which were complex for IT and security staff to manage and delivered slower, less reliable connections for end users. To address these challenges, Easygo has rolled out Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to secure and streamline access across its workforce. This approach improves security and operational efficiency with more granular controls and visibility and delivers a fast, consistent user experience across locations.

“Cloudflare is helping us achieve a Zero Trust implementation by establishing context-specific access for every employee, resource, product, tool, or environment on our network,” says McKinnon. “Whether an employee is at home, working on a development workstation, or answering emails from the airport, we know they have the appropriate security posture.”

Driving developer efficiency and accelerating workflows in the connectivity cloud

While security and performance are increasingly important to Easygo from an operational perspective, rapid innovation and developer agility still drive the company. Connecting and managing workflows, processes, digital environments, tools, and architectural configurations with the connectivity cloud — Cloudflare’s secure, unified, any-to-any platform of cloud-native services on the global network — provided significant business value, spiking the efficiency of Easygo’s high-performance development culture.

“Developer productivity time is one of our most important metrics,” says McKinnon. “Limiting complexity and automating manual processes using Cloudflare, we reduced one of our key activity streams from four hours to a few minutes. That opened up cycle times and freed us to do more important work.”

Reflecting on the advantages of Cloudflare’s holistic approach and why it works for Easygo, McKinnon says:

“There's a consistency and flow to the Cloudflare platform — it is not about using a single service in isolation, but taking a comprehensive, ensemble approach to solving greater business challenges.”

Easygo and Cloudflare have formed a partnership that extends beyond the traditional client/vendor experience.

“There is an engineering companionship there. We're doing some really interesting work with the Cloudflare product teams,” McKinnon says. “Cloudflare and Easygo are birds of a feather — world-class engineers putting our heads together to achieve great things.”