GMO Internet Group

Automating security — GMO Internet Group mitigates DDoS threats and malicious bot attacks with Cloudflare

The GMO Internet Group provides customers with a broad variety of services, ranging from Internet infrastructure, SSL management, web hosting, and domain registration to advertising and media, crypto assets and finance. Since 1995, the company has grown exponentially — encompassing over 103 companies and providing contracted services to over 15 million clients in 20 countries worldwide

Because of its rapid growth, the GMO Internet Group is a mainstay of the Japanese Internet and communications ecosystem, providing, according to its slogan, “Internet for All.” The company has also formed a series of international subsidiaries like Z.com and GMO GlobalSign that extend its operations to Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam.

Challenge: Addressing increasingly sophisticated, large-scale Internet threats

With a highly diverse portfolio of products and services, data security and customer trust are central to GMO Internet Group’s success. As the company and its subsidiaries grew, however, finding an efficient, cost-effective way to secure its public-facing websites, APIs, endpoints, and data centers became problematic, especially with Internet-borne attacks increasing in both scale and sophistication. Performance drops and potential service outages due to DDoS threats, bots, and attackers jeopardized the company’s ability to provide a frictionless customer experience.

“Our existing WAF solution was cumbersome — updating and propagating new WAF rules required substantial operational time and effort while offering limited protection,” explains Rei Hasegawa, Executive Lead, Project Management Team, Infrastructure and Operation Division, System Division, GMO Internet Group. “We realized that for truly responsive, real-time protection against Internet-based threats, we needed the advanced countermeasures only a cloud-based WAF could provide.”

Solution: Enhanced security and a seamless implementation process

The GMO Internet Group conducted extensive research, establishing proofs of concept (POCs) to evaluate WAF solutions from the top vendors in the cyber security and content delivery marketplace. After multiple trials, the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall stood out above the alternatives.

The cornerstone of Cloudflare’s application services, the Cloudflare WAF, provides GMO Internet Group with comprehensive website, API, and application security on the global network. Cloudflare gives GMO Internet Group granular control over its web security and allows it to thwart malicious bot, DDoS, and zero-day attacks on the network edge without requiring expensive and difficult-to-maintain on-site hardware.

The Cloudflare WAF provides machine learning, threat intelligence insights, and central security management for all GMO Internet Group’s international subsidiary domains. It is also able to fine-tune security with Cloudflare’s managed rules, Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) rule sets, and powerful manual response options.

“We can control web traffic site by site, and evaluate the efficacy of our WAF rules in real time,” says Hasegawa. “Cloudflare’s detailed logging and security analytics gave us the insights and confidence we needed to take the WAF live at scale, and our deployment went seamlessly, with no problems.”

Automated threat detection and mitigation reduces operational burdens

The low-maintenance, centrally-administered Cloudflare WAF substantially decreased the workload of GMO Internet Group engineers, IT technicians, and support desk staff, eliminating the need for third-party WAF maintenance.

“Even though we outsourced management responsibilities for our legacy WAF, we still needed to dedicate significant internal resources daily to scrutinize security events, and deal with each new incident case-by-case,” says Hasegawa. “Using Cloudflare, we have automated and improved our threat detection accuracy. Managing security for each site internally from a single control plane minimizes the operational burdens on our support staff, reducing problem reports and freeing our technical teams to focus on service improvements rather than fighting fires.”

With Cloudflare effortlessly mitigating threats to the company’s websites, endpoints, and applications, GMO Internet Group enjoys reduced bandwidth costs and improved server availability.

Enhancing network performance with Workers and the Cloudflare developer platform

The GMO Internet Group achieves additional security and performance gains using the Cloudflare developer platform. With Workers, Cloudflare’s highly configurable, edge-based application development platform, The GMO Internet Group can run its domestic Japanese and international products near the customer on Cloudflare’s global network. This reduces latency and page load times, enhancing the customer experience.

Cloudflare's extensive network of data centers throughout Asia — including four prominent locations in Japan — helped drive GMO Internet Group's partnership decision.

“Workers gives us flexible control over our web applications and allows us to leverage open technologies like JavaScript/Typescript on the global network,” says Hasegawa. “Cloudflare points of presence in Japan and around the world are so well-developed, Cloudflare was the obvious choice.”

Exceptional customer service and future plans

GMO Internet Group is an organization that provides top-notch customer service to companies around the world. In Cloudflare, it found a service partner who shared its customer-first priorities — and exceeded its high expectations.

“Cloudflare provides us with a level of support we have experienced nowhere else,” says Hasegawa, “It always responds immediately to difficult technical inquiries and arranges regular meetings to follow up on the performance of our Cloudflare services.”

Based on positive outcomes, GMO Internet Group plans to onboard more Cloudflare solutions, enhancing its current DDoS protection with Cloudflare Magic Transit and securing employees and internal resources with the Cloudflare Zero Trust and the SASE and SSE Platform.