WA.Technology

WA.Technology gains a competitive edge by building a trusted, high-performance iGaming platform with help from Cloudflare

WA.Technology excels in the iGaming industry by offering a robust, reliable, and flexible platform for online betting and gambling sites. The company’s WA.Platform provides a foundation for a wide range of online casino, sportsbook, lottery, fantasy, and other websites used by more than 100 client companies. With that platform, as well as the company’s turnkey solutions, standalone products, and managed services, WA.Technology clients can rapidly launch new sites and expand into new markets around the globe.

Navigating a competitive marketplace

As WA.Technology develops innovative products and adds services, the company’s team must stay focused on end users. “It’s a very competitive market for iGaming platform providers,” says Juan Gonzalez, head of base tech at WA.Technology. “We are continuously looking for ways to improve end-user experiences. And that means delivering strong performance everywhere that our platform customers are doing business around the world.”

Providing a stable platform is also essential. “If our clients experience an outage, they lose money,” says Rafael Campuzano, chief technology officer for WA.Technology. “One of our key differentiators is the stability our platform can deliver.”

Maintaining that stability means addressing growing threats. The company must safeguard their services and their customers’ sites from DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and more. “We know that a reputation can be damaged quickly, and there’s a point of no return,” says Luke Martinez, director of product for WA.Technology. “We need technology partners that can help us mitigate risks while also complying with a range of global regulations.”

Building a robust iGaming platform with help from Cloudflare

WA.Technology made the move to Cloudflare in the company’s early days, after initially attempting to manage a CDN on their own. “It was very difficult to maintain a CDN in-house while defending against DNS attacks and bots,” says Gonzalez. “We were vulnerable to threats and couldn’t guarantee the uptime that our clients required.”

The company adopted the Cloudflare CDN and quickly capitalized on DDoS protection and the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF). With the CDN capabilities, WA.Technology could deliver outstanding website performance to the company’s clients and their end users. Meanwhile, the security features immediately began addressing the attacks that had put uptime at risk.

“Cloudflare stops the attacks that cause iGaming outages,” says Campuzano. “With Cloudflare, we also have the flexibility to configure services for our particular needs.”

Since the initial deployment, WA.Technology has incorporated several additional security features from Cloudflare — such as Bot Management, Advanced Rate Limiting, and Turnstile — as well as Argo Smart Routing. “Advanced Rate Limiting has been one of the most useful features in helping us protect applications and APIs. Turnstile further protects API endpoints,” says Gonzalez. “We are also using Argo to redirect traffic to the fastest paths across the Cloudflare network, which helps us improve performance.” By using Argo and CDN, WA.Technology’s traffic has been accelerated by 53.6%.

Stopping attacks and avoiding costly outages

Using Cloudflare security services has helped WA.Technology successfully defend against the DDoS attacks, malicious bot attacks, and other threats that can ruin end-user experiences. “Attacks and outages can be very expensive for our clients,” says Martinez. “With Cloudflare, we have significantly reduced risks for clients and helped them avoid costly downtime.”

“Whenever organizations become successful, they attract more attackers. That has happened to our clients and to us,” says Campuzano. “Cloudflare has really made a difference in preventing this attention from becoming a problem. We have much less downtime than our competitors — and that makes us stand out in a very competitive field.”

Though the attacks keep coming against WA.Technology, the team does not feel their impact. “We rarely experience those attacks at all because Cloudflare is doing such a good job,” says Martinez.

Enhancing trust through platform security and stability

By continuously preventing attacks and avoiding outages, WA.Technology enhances trust among existing clients. “In this industry, trust is fundamental,” says Campuzano. “Individuals trust iGaming website operators with their money. And because we use Cloudflare, those operators can trust us to keep their sites secure and stable.”

Working with Cloudflare helps convey a high level of trustworthiness to prospective clients as well. “When our commercial team approaches a new client, we mention that we are using Cloudflare, and they immediately know that our platform is safe and reliable,” says Gonzalez.

Delivering robust global performance — while controlling costs

With Cloudflare, WA.Technology makes it easy for iGaming companies to run sites in a wide array of geographical markets while maintaining strong performance. “Thanks to Cloudflare, we serve customer websites from Europe and support end users across Latin America, Africa, Oceania, and Asia,” says Campuzano. “The Cloudflare global network, with its caching capabilities, helps ensure that sites are fast everywhere.”

By using caching, WA.Technology has been able to avoid installing multiple instances of the company’s platform close to users. “We do not have the overhead of having to buy and maintain infrastructure in numerous locations,” says Campuzano. “We are avoiding at least 50% of those costs with Cloudflare.”

Expanding into new markets

WA.Technology is currently scaling up, supporting more customers and their end users around the world with help from Cloudflare. “During the last year, we scaled our platform to support at least a 200% increase in global user traffic,” says Gonzalez. “We’re also expanding into new markets. We’re able to grow as a company without affecting performance and security.”

Looking ahead with Cloudflare

Given the success WA.Technology has had with Cloudflare over nearly a decade, it’s not surprising that the team continues to explore additional Cloudflare services and solutions. “We’ve been looking at Workers as a way to place resources closer to end users at the edge — that should further enhance performance,” says Gonzalez. “We’re also considering R2 Storage to reduce the costs of cloud-based storage. And we see Zero Trust capabilities as a way to strengthen our security even more.”

In working with Cloudflare over the years, the WA.Technology team has found a very responsive partner. “The Cloudflare team is always available to help us address our unique issues and even tweak tools to solve problems,” says Martinez. “They provide very tailored support and solutions for our specific challenges.”

The strong relationship with Cloudflare will help WA.Technology continue to develop innovative services and reach new customers around the globe. “Our company is growing rapidly,” says Campuzano. “With Cloudflare, we have a strong partner and flexible services that will keep growing with us in the future.”