Scaling Security and Visibility for Winning Group

The challenge

Winning Group needed complete application layer protection and visibility that would scale with the growth of their e-commerce sales.

Future expansion and growth, including M&A activity, prompted the Winning Group team to strengthen their overall security posture at the application layer to protect customer-facing web applications, payment gateways, customer portals and APIs.

Before Fastly, Winning Group used different methods to secure their web applications, including maximizing best practices for their CDN, firewall, and coding methods. But the problems they experienced indicated that this strategy wouldn’t scale as the company grew.

Real-time Visibility
After-the-fact log searches and triaging of web attacks were possible, but Winning Group lacked the ability to engage in real-time investigation or remediation. Staff had no insight into what level of web request traffic was real versus that generated by bots, making it difficult to parse a user’s true journey while on their sites.

Increased Man-Hours
The team needed more automation to enable effective investigation of potential incidents. This manual work was tedious and time-consuming, which resulted in frequent context switching and lost productivity from many developers on the team.

Responsive Support
Although they previously worked with a top CDN provider, they did not enjoy the customer experience and services provided. Additionally, they also found the provider was not developer-friendly and slow to respond or take action, resulting in lost productivity and a frustrating customer experience.

The solution

Winning Group needed a WAF solution that would automate manual processes, increase visibility into their web traffic activity, and improve incident response time. Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF delivered the performance and insight they need to scale confidently. Winning Group’s CTO Dax Lee and technology partner Section.io selected Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF based on our industry reputation and ability to meet the challenges the company faced.

The key evaluation criteria included:

• Effective automated detection and blocking in production


• Integrating with Section.io


• Visibility into traffic and attacks at the web attack layer


• Hands-off maintenance

After starting in monitoring mode for a week, Winning Group became a customer in just a month. And with implementation provided by Section.io, it was a hands-off deployment and configuration process. Fastly now protects four of their web properties and will expand to others.

Visibility and Insights
The Fastly dashboard and tagging capabilities gave Winning Group new insights into their application layer activity. They now see and stop traffic spikes that slow down search queries, improving app performance and providing their customers an overall better shopping experience. Winning Group CTO Dax Lee says, “Deploying Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF was an eye-opener. We now have visibility into how much garbage traffic we receive and have the tools to block it."

Reduced Developer Time
Winning Group didn’t want another tool to manage: the solution needed to provide automated protection without additional overhead. Key site metrics and KPIs in the Fastly’s unified management console dramatically reduced the amount of resources required to triage incidents, while our automated detection and blocking capabilities ensured a “hands-off” approach from the dev teams.

Customer-focused Support
Fastly always puts our customers’ needs first, and Winning Group has seen firsthand what it means to be a partner. “Fastly’s support team is on-par with some of the best. Unlike other vendors we’ve worked with, they have fast response times and are always on point. Their personal approach and fast response times made us feel secure we made the right choice.” Dax Lee, Chief Technology Officer.