Cloudflare + Acquia Cloud Edge
With nearly 2 million sites built on the open-source content management framework Drupal, the Drupal community is growing stronger by the day. To address the demands of this ever-increasing customer base, Acquia and Cloudflare teamed up to provide security and performance solutions for websites built on Drupal.
Acquia Cloud Edge Powered by Cloudflare is a family of products that extends the security and performance advantages of the Acquia Platform to the edge of the distribution network. Edge protects websites against security threats, ensures 100% clean traffic, and speeds up the performance of the site no matter where visitors are located.
Instantly Improve Your Site
Websites using Acquia Cloud Edge powered by Cloudflare experience tremendous benefits, including:
- 2x faster speed
- 60% less bandwidth
- 65% fewer requests
- 100% clean traffic
- Easy-to-use, all-in-one solution
- No hardware, no software to install
Security
Web security attacks continue to increase in size and frequency, with damages ranging from lost productivity to lost revenue, leaked customer data, and harm to the brand’s reputation. With Cloudflare security features included, Acquia-powered sites are protected from DDoS attacks of all forms and sizes including those that target the UDP and ICMP protocols, as well as SYN/ACK, DNS amplification and Layer 7 attacks. Online attacks are stopped before they reach your property, so that your site can optimally serve legitimate visitors.
Protection Against DDoS and Other Network-Level Attacks
Acquia Cloud Edge powered by Cloudflare sits on the network edge in front of Acquia web servers. This allows the Cloudflare integration to mitigate DDoS attacks and other malicious content without compromising your website performance. Cloudflare sees over 5% of Internet traffic, allowing for early identification of attack patterns and questionable visitors, mitigating an attack before it reaches your website.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Acquia Cloud Edge powered by Cloudflare includes WAF protection to secure your website from SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS) and zero-day attacks, including OWASP-identified vulnerabilities and threats targeting the application layer. Designed for easy customization, specific WAF rule sets can be implemented within minutes and can include protection from newly discovered platform vulnerabilities. For example, when the Drupal Security Team released a critical security patch for SQL injection vulnerability, Cloudflare immediately updated our Drupal WAF rules. Any customer using the WAF and with the Drupal rule set enabled received automatic protection (read here).
Easy SSL
Acquia Cloud Edge powered by Cloudflare has the advantage of Universal SSL, where Internet traffic can be encrypted by either Cloudflare’s or your own custom certificates. These can include domain name certs, SNI, and SAN certificates for easy management of the domain properties.
Performance
Cloudflare’s caching reverse proxy service combines high-speed DNS and a globally load-balanced CDN to speed up your sites by distributing content across the web while blocking malicious traffic. It automatically optimizes the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance from wherever they are around the world.
DNS
Acquia Cloud Edge powered by Cloudflare runs one of the largest authoritative DNS networks in the world. We’ve built DNS to be fast, powerful and secure. With Cloudflare’s authoritative DNS, you’ll get:
- Global coverage from an Anycast-powered network serving 130 billion queries per day
- Lightning-fast look-up speeds and instant DNS updates
- Built-in security to protect against DDoS and other web attacks
- Powerful functionality with no query limits, easy management and a robust API
CDN
Cloudflare operates out of 152 data centers around the world. Our CDN automatically caches your static files at our edge nodes so these files are stored closer to your visitors while delivering your dynamic content directly from your web server. Cloudflare then uses a technology called Anycast to route your visitors to the nearest data center. The result is that your website, on average, loads 2x faster regardless of visitors’ location.
