US County

This affluent and well-educated county is home to over 300,000 citizens. “We have citizens who expect quite a bit of their government,” related the county’s deputy CIO, “which creates both a challenge and an opportunity to deliver the best technology and services for our citizens. People come to our website for all sorts of things ranging from reporting illegal signs, to contacting the County Executive, to paying water bills. The government is always on in some capacity; we manage 24/7 IT services as well as normal, everyday citizen functions.”

The County’s Challenge: Malicious Attackers Focused on their Website

“We had our website defaced back in June,” the Deputy CIO related. “I think we got on the radar of people pointing their scripts at different sites to see if they worked. Then we had a DDoS attack, which took us offline. We tried isolated IP blocking and firewall type solutions, but they were ineffective.”

The County’s Solution: A Helping Hand

“Folks in our office had heard of Cloudflare’s Web Security,” the deputy CIO noted, “so when the discussion in the office began to be about ‘finding a vendor like Cloudflare’ they were the first vendor we turned to. We came to Cloudflare and they worked closely with us to get our system behind them without having the money part of things figured out. When you’re sitting there and your system is offline from a DDoS attack, no one cares that you have to go through a whole government RFP and buying process, they just want the site online. Cloudflare helped me solve the technical problem, implement a solution on a Friday night before a long weekend, and said we could worry about the money next week. As someone who was at maximum frustration that was music to my ears.”