Centralizing Visibility While Reducing Operational Cost

The challenge

DeNA’s legacy WAF provided high operational costs and response times, especially during critical traffic spikes. As the company continued to expand its offerings and provide great digital experiences for their customers, DeNA knew it needed to scale its web security posture to match. But their legacy hardware WAF was causing the team multiple issues and made it difficult to operate efficiently.

During traffic spikes, the legacy WAF’s admin portal loaded slowly and prevented the team from addressing issues quickly. Additionally, it was impossible for the DeNA team to reroute customer page requests if their WAF was not performing correctly. The legacy WAF’s performance, combined with the high price of scaling hardware investments, made it clear to DeNA that they needed a new solution that can perform under pressure.

The solution

Fastly provided DeNA scalable performance and centralized visibility that couldn’t be provided by their legacy hardware WAF. DeNA deployed Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF across five of its properties and saw performance improvements after an easy installation.

Reduced Operational and Capital Expenses
DeNA was able to reduce their operational expenses by using Fastly. They no longer needed engineers dedicated to costly rules or policy tuning necessary for a traditional WAF. Additionally, Fastly was more cost-efficient to scale with their business than their previous hardware WAF.

Attack Detection Based on Rich Web Request Context
DeNA’s legacy WAF relied on static regex pattern matching rules, which often let attacks pass through without additional context, such as reconnaissance attacks. Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF provides a better, more innovative approach to detecting and blocking potential attacks. We leverage known-bad IP lists to compliment our proprietary SmartParse technology and make fast, inline blocking decisions. Additionally, Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF enriches decisioning with our Network Learning Exchange to further evaluate web requests’ source IP reputation.

Deeper Visibility Across the Organization
With Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF, DeNA now has deeper organizational and attack visibility. Our dashboards provide a single source of truth for multiple teams and stakeholders throughout the business. Additionally, they now see new activity on their network that was previously unknown to them, such as traffic from the Tor network.