Villeroy & Boch is one of the world's leading premium brands for ceramic products. Founded in 1748 and headquartered in Mettlach, Germany, the family-owned company stands for innovation, tradition and style. As a renowned lifestyle brand, Villeroy & Boch is represented in 125 countries with products in the Bathroom & Wellness and Dining & Lifestyle segments. The company continues to expand and innovate by growing their global direct-to-consumer ecommerce infrastructure. Villeroy and Boch report annual revenues totaling €945 million.
To better meet the demands of an expanding marketplace, Villeroy & Boch recently moved a large portion of their infrastructure and internal applications — including content management systems for regional marketing websites, and Commerce Cloud, their sales platform — to the cloud.
With over 70% of its internal applications offsite, however, the company recognized the urgency of securing them against mounting threats like bot attacks, DDoS, and inventory hoarding.
“The risk of malicious activity on the web has only increased over the years,” explains Erik Heinen, Villeroy & Boch’s Lead CIT for CRM & ECM. “Shifting our business to the cloud required a much stronger focus on security.”
Looking for a solution, Villeroy & Boch conducted extensive research and compiled a list of potential security partners. Based on their findings, the team selected Cloudflare layer 7 services — Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS Protection, and Bot Management — to secure their growing cloud infrastructure.
“Cloudflare was one of the only vendors that met all of our technical and budgetary requirements,” says Heinen. “The dedication and flexibility of the Cloudflare team during the discovery process made them our first choice.”
Working closely with the Villeroy & Boch team to ensure smooth onboarding, Cloudflare lived up to the company’s expectations.
“Support during the implementation was excellent. Cloudflare worked with us day and night to get everything running,” says Schneider. “The few times we had an issue, the Cloudflare team was on hand to solve it almost immediately.”
Cloudflare customer support engineers (CSEs) also collaborated with the engineering team to complete the integration of Villeroy & Boch’s Commerce Cloud e-commerce portals.