CASE STUDY
Imperva secures NetRefer’s website and boosts performance CASE STUDY Imperva secures NetRefer’s website and boosts performance
Company Background
Founded in 2005, NetRefer provides performance marketing software to its affiliate programs. Using NetRefer’s Unified Performance Marketing Platform, companies can automate their entire affiliate life cycle, from enrollment through CRM management, Website tracking, finance and rewards management, payments, and more. It’s a comprehensive www.netrefer.com system that streamlines the work and reduces the price of affiliate program management. Industry In just 12 years, NetRefer’s software has become the most trusted affiliate marketing Marketing Software software in the gaming, foreign exchange, finance, and option trading markets. Founded Business and Technical Challenge 2005
As the company has grown, NetRefer’s affiliate marketing platforms supporting 80 CEO gaming operators have become increasingly vulnerable to attacks. While NetRefer had Raphael Arnold DDoS protection from its hosting environment, it was extremely limited in its ability to scrub traffic, and it lacked a web application firewall (WAF). It also didn’t provide the kind of cross-platform visibility that NetRefer’s IT team needed to see and fix problems early on. Transitioning to a cloud-based service was also a challenge. Key to NetRefer’s success was finding a secure, always-on system that was easy to use and kept downtime to a minimum. Service disruptions could seriously impact revenue, causing customers to find another, more reliable platform. “Being able to identify threats and block them on the fly is critical,” said Christian Cutajar, IT manager for NetRefer. “By strengthening our security, we can show our clients that their data is safe.” Visibility was a vital component of any application that NetRefer considered. It was one of the features its current system was lacking, and without it, they had no idea whether any of its various environments was at risk. Other important features NetRefer needed included a scalable system, fast and reliable content delivery, and a level of customer support that was second to none. They found all this, and more, with the Imperva Incapsula solution.
The Solution
Once the IT team at NetRefer identified the issues they needed to address, they began searching online. A report by a leading market research team on Web Application Firewalls provided much of the information the IT team needed. They also sought recommendations from hosting providers and had conversations with several well- known providers. NetRefer discovered that most of the products they researched were more expensive and didn’t offer many of the features they found in Incapsula. The IT team decided to go with Incapsula Web Application Firewall.
2 CASE STUDY Imperva secures NetRefer’s website and boosts performance
According to Cutajar, “Securing our core services and avoiding system hijacking is Securing our core services absolutely critical. Investing in a solution that gives you and your customers peace of and avoiding system mind is a must. And, we’ve found that with Incapsula.” Since deploying Incapsula, NetRefer can route traffic at the DNS level instead of dealing hijacking is absolutely with multiple devices. This allows them to focus on moving towards a PaaS solution long term. critical. Investing in a More important, the always-on DDoS mitigation service keeps their systems safe and solution that gives you and secure. It also provides the increased visibility they need to find and deal with potential security threats and malicious activity before they become serious problems. your customers peace of While NetRefer engaged Imperva to solve their DDoS mitigation needs with the mind is a must. And, we’ve Incapsula service, they also achieved a significant performance benefit by activating the Incapsula Content Delivery Network. Leveraging the content-aware Incapsula CDN, found that with Incapsula.
NetRefer saw a 50 percent performance improvement on their site. CHRISTIAN CUTAJAR IT MANAGER, NETREFER
Results and Benefits Increased visibility: NetRefer now has a granular view of events and traffic across all environments. Leveraging advanced cached bandwidth capabilities allowed us to increase site performance by 50 percent.
24/7 DDoS mitigation: Incapsula significantly improved security and reduced downtime by fending off attacks. Threat alerts: NetRefer admins now know when there are illegal attempts to access protected resources on its website, such as SQL injection requests on NetRefer’s clients’ front-end systems and XSS on specific page parameters.
Great support: More comprehensive reports provide insight into all aspects of NetRefer’s systems. NetRefer also reduced its annual expenditure, and now have access to a team of professionals for consultation and security advice.
3 CASE STUDY Imperva secures NetRefer’s website and boosts performance
About Imperva Incapsula Imperva Incapsula is a cloud-based application delivery service that protects websites and increases their performance, improving end user experiences and safeguarding web applications and their data from attack. Incapsula includes a web application firewall to thwart hacking attempts, DDoS protection to ensure DDoS attacks don’t impact online business assets, a content delivery network to optimize web traffic, and a load balancer to maximize the potential of web environments.
WEBSITE DDOS SECU ITY OTECTIO
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Only Incapsula provides enterprise-grade website security and performance without the need for hardware, software, or specialized expertise. Unlike competitive solutions, Incapsula uses proprietary technologies such as client classification to identify bad bots, and big data analysis of security events to increase accuracy without creating false positives.
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