Stuff streamlines security by replatforming with Fastly

The challenge

Stuff's central mission is to make New Zealand a better place. For the Stuff platform team, the foundation of that mission is delivering content quickly and ensuring the stability and reliability of the Stuff.co.nz platform. Stuff continually strives to modernise and enhance its digital services, but its legacy platform hindered innovation. Building and deploying new products—the basis of Stuff's commitment to user experience—had become prohibitively expensive, and the platform itself was complex to use.

"We hit a point where we needed a complete replatform to stay innovative and fast-paced in our product division," said James McLean, Head of Platforms at Stuff. Stuff turned to Fastly to accelerate development, maintain a strong security posture, and ensure fast, high-quality delivery to every user on a tightly integrated platform.

The solution

The breadth of Fastly's solutions allowed Stuff to completely replatform, using Fastly not only for content delivery but also for security and DevOps. "Replatforming with Fastly provides the basis for how we innovate, build new products and improve user experience," McLean said.

Stuff wanted a long-term partner, and Fastly was prepared to commit. According to McLean, "The CDN partnership plays such a critical role in the security and performance of our website. Fastly was willing to sit down with us and take the time to understand our business and our architecture, then think about how Fastly could help with our specific needs."

Fastly’s developer-friendly tools unlock creativity

"We engaged with Fastly because of its heritage as a strong developer-led organization," McLean said. With Stuff's legacy CDN solution, developers couldn't roll out changes as fast as they wished. Changes were routed through requests to the vendor, which involved wait times for responses and hoping changes would be implemented correctly the first time.

By contrast, Fastly's developer-centric API lets Stuff developers use the infrastructure-as-code approach they prefer. Developers have the control and flexibility to iterate and roll back quickly, so Stuff can implement new ideas immediately without worries about downtime. Plus, Fastly support is just a Slack message away when Stuff needs guidance with VCL rules. Stuff also uses Fastly Compute as a protected pre-production environment to support its DevOps focus, so developers can test and deliver the innovations that keep users engaged.

Next-Gen WAF and Managed Security keep Stuff focused

Adopting Fastly's Next-Gen WAF helps Stuff keep the platform team focused on innovation. The Next-Gen WAF deploys quickly and can be used in blocking mode with virtually no false positives, so no time is lost on distractions. "The WAF is extremely straightforward to use, and it's easy to add new rules to adapt to different traffic patterns on our website," McLean said.

Stuff relies on a mixture of vendors and staff to stay on top of security 24/7. To stay ahead of security threats, the company uses Fastly's Managed Security Service for continuous monitoring and proactive threat-hunting. And if someone on the Stuff team notices a suspicious traffic pattern, they can hand it off to MSS for further investigation, so its team can focus on moving development projects forward.

"Fastly's MSS is like an extension of our team. I can reach out to them anytime to discuss something. We’ve had managed WAF services from other vendors, but Fastly’s accessibility is unique,” McLean said.

Fastly, reliable service on any device

“Our vision is to be the most trusted organisation in New Zealand, and a major part of trust is providing a reliable, fast service for our users and commercial customers. Fastly plays a big role in that," said McLean. Replatforming into Fastly's API-led system allowed Stuff to leverage caching more powerfully resulting in a 98% cache offload efficiency reducing the need to scale hosting infrastructure.

Stuff is investigating moving more logic to the edge with Fastly Compute, so users across New Zealand, especially the growing audience of users on mobile devices, have a speedy, reliable experience no matter where they are.

Key takeaway

Replatforming with Fastly positioned Stuff for the future, freeing the platform team to innovate briskly while enhancing its security posture and delivering content more quickly. "Fastly is nimble, innovative, and easy to work with," said McLean, "so it's been a perfect fit for our goal to move fast and deliver reliability for the overall good of New Zealand."