Upyun

Upyun protects clients from attacks and improves customer satisfaction and retention with Cloudflare

Upyun is committed to providing customers with fully customizable CDN solutions. Based in Hangzhou, China, Upyun provides cloud storage, cloud processing, cloud security, AI video cloud, traffic marketing, and other services to help their users accelerate content distribution, product development, and business growth.

In addition to cloud services, Upyun offers live streaming, on-demand broadcasts, CDN acceleration solutions, and more. Their open and highly scalable API are used by developers to help companies obtain reliable, safe, and fast basic storage systems at affordable prices. Upyun’s clients include large, recognizable brands used all over the world like Starbucks and Bytedance, and many others in the ecommerce, gaming, and elearning industries.

Challenge: Global expansion poses security and performance problems

In recent years, many Chinese companies have been eager to expand to overseas markets. However, as these companies begin to scale their operations, they also open themselves up to increased performance and security risks.

For Upyun, this shift posed a serious concern. Not only did they need to find a secure, fast, and scalable way of helping their customers grow - they also needed to be able to seamlessly handle increased volume from both local and international visitors during high-traffic events. With Singles’ Day, the largest online shopping day in the world according to Forbes, fast approaching, Upyun began to look for a vendor who could support them during these high pressure situations and beyond.

Cloudflare WAF and Spectrum provide much-needed security

When evaluating potential vendors, Upyun listened to the advice of their customers - many of whom had previous experience with Cloudflare. Liming Zhu, Senior Vice President of Development at Upyun, said, “Our existing clients that have deployed Cloudflare security solutions highly recommended that we consider adding Cloudflare to our portfolio. Knowing that so many of our customers were already Cloudflare users definitely made an impact on our decision.”

The original engagement with Cloudflare began when one of their own customers, a major game developer, started to encounter malicious attacks while scaling their business overseas.

“When communicating with this client who was under attack, the need for website security was critical. We quickly teamed up with Cloudflare and developed a joint solution designed for this client’s specific needs,” Zhu adds.

This solution was a combination of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Spectrum. Cloudflare WAF was able to mitigate ongoing attacks and provide a stalwart defense against incoming threats, while Spectrum acted as a reverse proxy to protect their TCP/UDP applications.

With the help of Cloudflare’s integrated threat protection and the attack mitigated, the gaming developer was able to focus less of his time on attack prevention and more time on growing his user base. This positive feedback from the customer laid the foundation for future projects with Cloudflare as Upyun began to roll out the solutions to the rest of their customer base.

While reflecting on the collaboration, Zhu said, “The timing could not have been better. We met the right partner at the right time.”

Cloudflare’s vast number of global data centers significantly improves user experience

Before partnering with Cloudflare, Upyun’s ecommerce customers struggled to support their users during peak shopping times - when traffic spikes would lead to high latency and negatively impacted sales.

Cloudflare’s global cloud network proved to be the lifesaver Upyun and their customers needed. With hundreds of data centers all over the world, Cloudflare is able to improve site speed, uptime, and reliability for anyone connected to their network. As a result, Upyun’s users saw a boost in performance - up to 30% - which helped relieve pressure in peak seasons and on critical shopping days, like Singles’ Day. These improvements also led to Upyun seeing an increase in customer satisfaction and retention, contributing to their dominant position in the market.

“In a business like ours, it is critical to have a highly customizable and reliable solution,” says Zhu. “With the Cloudflare global network, we were able to reduce a great deal of manual attack intervention while improving our performance at the same time.”

Cloudflare’s suite of security and performance products have consistently helped Upyun better serve their global customer base, and they look forward to a stronger partnership. Zhu adds, “We have received nothing but positive feedback from our clients about Cloudflare. It is the best choice in the industry, hands down.”