Viafirma

With Cloudflare, Viafirma establishes its Zero Trust strategy and delivers better, more reliable, and faster digital signature services

Since 2003, Viafirma has helped customers automate complex signing procedures. The result: less time, effort, and money spent shepherding paperwork through manual signature processes.

Viafirma’s global customer base spans more than 15 countries and includes high-profile names such as Toyota, Sephora, and Heineken. These customers expect high performance and exceptional security to support their rapidly growing use of digital signatures.

Challenge: Offer secure, high-performance digital signature capabilities at competitive prices

Several years ago, Viafirma conducted an assessment of its security, availability, and performance landscape and discovered that the increasing volume of signature transactions was putting stress on the company’s underlying infrastructure.

In addition, the company was using Imperva Cloud for its critical applications, APIs, and data. Managing the environment was cumbersome for administrators who had to manually configure security settings for each subdomain independently. Managing multiple domains with Imperva Cloud was expensive and time consuming.

What’s more, Imperva’s high volume of latency and availability issues, such as micro-outages between continents, would cost the company up to 10% per month in lost service and ability to manage customer transactions. Viafirma saw an opportunity to deliver better, more reliable, and faster digital experiences, and in turn, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. The challenge was to address the issues while keeping costs low and maintaining competitive pricing.

Solution: Cloudflare delivers strong security, fast connection times, and low latency across the entire network

After investigating its options, Viafirma found that Cloudflare could outperform their previous vendor at a significantly lower cost. Today, Cloudflare protects all 10 of Viafirma’s domains, three of which are primary and carry the heaviest traffic. Cloudflare operates in front of all of Viafirma products and services, filtering requests, identifying and blocking threats, and speeding response.

The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides insight into security threats by providing detailed metrics describing threats and actions taken to prevent breaches. WAF incorporates the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Core Ruleset, which helps Viafirma provide exceptional protection against the top 10 OWASP security vulnerabilities which they had been lacking in the past.

Serrano notes that bot and DDoS attacks are the two biggest threats Viafirma faces. Cloudflare provides strong protection against both. Cloudflare Bot Management blocks malicious bots in real time to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data while allowing entry to good bots, such as engine crawlers and aggregator bots. And Cloudflare’s web application and network DDoS protection effectively blocks DDoS attacks.

With Cloudflare’s global network, Viafirma is able to maintain content much closer to its customers. That, combined with caching in point-of-presence servers, has eliminated micro-outages and latency issues. “With Cloudflare, the micro-outages we were experiencing between continents disappeared,” Serrano notes. “Both latency and application availability improved dramatically.”

Better security at a lower cost

In Serrano’s opinion, Cloudflare is essential for any application that is exposed to the internet. Cloudflare has enabled Viafirma to strengthen security and improve performance without budget-busting expenditures.

“With our previous vendor, we had to secure subdomains one at a time and the pricing structure made it expensive to secure multiple subdomains,” Serrano explains. “With Cloudflare we can secure an entire domain at a lower cost, so we’re getting much more value for the money we spend.”

Securing access to internal apps with faster connection speed

Viafirma has also adopted Cloudflare Zero Trust to secure access to key internal applications across the majority of its employees, who are distributed largely across Madrid, Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and Seattle.

Specifically, Viafirma deployed Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) service, to replace its legacy VPN, which was clunky and burdensome to maintain. With Cloudflare, administrators configured policies and secured access to resources within a day, and ongoing maintenance is fast and simple, especially compared to managing the VPN. Cloudflare also offers visibility into user traffic — every request to every resource — that their previous vendor did not provide. Moreover, replacing the VPN with Cloudflare has also improved the experience for end users.

“With Cloudflare, we have approximately tripled the connection speed to company applications compared to our VPN.” Serrano says. “With Zero Trust, we’re confident that all traffic in and out of our network is verified and authorized.”

A partnership that delivers results

According to Serrano, Viafirma is benefiting not only from exceptional security and performance, but also from Cloudflare’s expertise. Cloudflare resources such as webinars and the Cloudflare Learning Center provide valuable insight into getting started quickly when new features are implemented and ensuring that best practices are employed when using Cloudflare capabilities. When questions and issues arise, the support team responds quickly with details on problem resolution.

“If I had to describe Cloudflare in a single word, it would be ‘indispensable,’” Serrano concludes. “Thanks to the support organization and the account team, we are constantly discovering new ways to get more value from our investment in Cloudflare.”