Fashion ecommerce in Europe is growing nearly five times faster than the fashion industry overall and is projected to reach €130B in revenue by 2024. As Europe’s leading online fashion platform, with annual revenues of €8 billion, Berlin-based Zalando is disrupting the highly competitive online fashion industry. Zalando’s more than 46 million active customers can browse an extensive collection of clothing, shoes, beauty products, and accessories from over 4500 international brands, sold across 23 countries. While the bulk of its sales are online, the company also operates 12 (and counting) brick-and-mortar outlet retail stores in Germany.
Zalando’s enterprise network connects their fulfillment centers, the fashion store, outlet retail locations, and company headquarters. If their network were to go offline, a cascade of problems could ensue. Warehouse workers would be left idle until the problem is fixed, causing fulfillment backlogs and electronic communications between fulfillment centers, outlet retail stores, and the company headquarters would come to a halt, further impeding customer service.
In early November 2020, DDoS attacks were gaining momentum and quickly increasing in frequency and intensity, and the fact that the holiday shopping season was rapidly approaching, convinced Zalando that they needed a proactive and robust network security solution for their enterprise network to prevent possible outages.
Zalando chose Cloudflare Magic Transit, a cloud-based solution that uses Cloudflare’s global network to protect entire IP subnets from DDoS attacks while also accelerating network traffic.
Cloudflare adds an additional layer of security to Zalando’s network while improving performance and availability, ensuring that customer orders are fulfilled quickly and accurately. It also enhances productivity and reduces operational costs by freeing up engineers to work on continuously enhancing the customer experience instead of mitigating DDoS attacks.