Taiwan financial trading institution

A financial trading institution in Taiwan moves to the cloud with Cloudflare to enhance security while maintaining performance

Until 2023, Taiwan strictly regulated the use of cloud services by financial institutions. Those organizations — including a major financial trading organization in Taiwan — were required to deploy many technology solutions, including security solutions, on premises. But this approach had notable limitations.

Traditional on-premises security solutions cannot adequately handle modern cyber attacks. Specifically, these solutions do not have sufficient network bandwidth to cope with large-scale attacks, including the enormous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that can quickly crash websites and impact end-user experiences.

When regulations eased, the financial trading organization in Taiwan began to explore cloud-based cybersecurity, which could provide greater scalability for modern attacks. As the search began, the organization defined several essential requirements.

First, they did not want data to pass through local nodes in China — in fact, Taiwanese government regulations prohibits data from passing through China, Hong Kong, or Macau. The solution provider had to offer data center locations in other nearby Asian countries.

Second, the organization wanted to keep cloud costs in check. Since the daily transaction volume for this financial trading organization is large, the leadership team knew that sending all traffic through a cloud provider could result in high traffic-based costs. They needed a way to minimize the costs of clean traffic while also avoiding charges for malicious traffic.

Finally, the organization had to maintain network performance no matter what types of attacks they faced. Blocking malicious traffic should not adversely affect the responsiveness of user experiences or their ability to make time-sensitive financial and trading decisions.

Addressing critical requirements with Cloudflare and Twister5

To design and deploy cloud-based security, the organization turned to Twister5 — a full-service application security firm and Cloudflare Select Partner in Taiwan. Twister5 offers professional Cloudflare consulting services through their dedicated team of technical experts.

With help from Twister5, the organization’s IT team designed an architecture that addresses essential objectives and requirements. That architecture uses both Cloudflare web application services and the organization’s existing on-premises solutions. The Cloudflare platform provides the initial line of defense: The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) automatically identifies and blocks suspicious traffic that might impact web applications. In addition, Cloudflare DDoS capabilities prevent denial-of-service attacks. The organization then uses the existing on-premises solutions as a secondary layer of defense. With the Cloudflare platform, the organization has the flexibility to retain that on-premises infrastructure and preserve their existing investment.

By working with Cloudflare, the organization can avoid sending traffic through nodes in China for filtering, helping to alleviate concerns about data leakage in that country. The Twister5 team configured the Cloudflare capabilities to filter traffic using nodes in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan itself.

Gaining network visibility and controlling cloud costs with Cloudflare

Unlike many other cloud providers, Cloudflare does not charge customers for malicious traffic. So, the financial trading organization in Taiwan is now able to defend against very large attacks while only paying for clean traffic.

The Cloudflare platform also provides the organization with clear visibility into all traffic. The existing on-premises solutions did have the ability to generate adequate reports on traffic, so team members had to estimate traffic manually. When the organization began using Cloudflare services, they learned that their traffic volumes were actually five times higher than previous estimates.

That visibility helps the organization minimize the costs of routing clean traffic as well. The technology team can now identify which traffic is coming from their customers, and they can avoid routing that traffic through the Cloudflare network. Using one-click switching set up by Twister5, the financial trading organization can route this safe traffic to their on-premises infrastructure.

Automating defenses against AI-powered attacks

Like companies in many other industries, the financial trading organization in Taiwan faces rapidly evolving threats. Cybercriminals are adopting AI to increase the speed, size, and sophistication of their attacks. For example, they are using AI to create more convincing messages for social engineering schemes while using AI-powered bots to support large-scale, automated attacks on websites. By using the Cloudflare WAF, the organization can leverage machine learning capabilities to automatically block threats as they emerge, in real time.

Maintaining performance while stopping large attacks

Importantly, the expansive, scalable Cloudflare network helps ensure responsive user experiences even as the organization continues to block large-scale attacks and AI-powered threats. For example, the organization successfully resisted a massive attack with a traffic volume that was 350 times larger than what the company encounters on a normal weekday. But because the Cloudflare network could easily absorb that attack, customer transactions continued without interruption.

Going forward, the leadership team knows that the organization will continue to be a prime target for large-scale attacks. But they also know that with Cloudflare, they can successfully defend against those attacks while continuing to deliver reliable performance and responsive experiences for customers.