Dataweavers

Dataweavers ensures frictionless enterprise onboarding and growing list of Sitecore customers using Cloudflare

Dataweavers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) automates and manages Sitecore cloud infrastructure, connecting and streamlining developer-to-production workflow and simplifying the operational management of environments. Dataweavers Platform Operations™ have been purpose-built to transform both composable Sitecore XM Cloud, XP/XM and hybrid configurations to drive innovation, reduce costs, increase security, improve performance and support teams to deliver exceptional digital experiences.

Coming from 30+ years of delivering large projects in big tech and running digital agencies, founder Ben Shapiro saw an opportunity to improve DXP cloud infrastructure operations with automation. Dataweavers was launched in 2018 which has since seen interest across the globe in many industries ranging from healthcare, automotive to financial services and more.

Challenge: Managing complexity while scaling the delivery of enterprise-level PaaS and managed service platforms

Dataweavers is committed to reducing complexity and building simpler experiences for its customers through its Platform Operations. The company’s tightly integrated, managed-platform offerings facilitate a collaborative environment, allowing customers to remove the distractions of infrastructure, security and performance issues to focus on creating meaningful digital experiences.

“Our purpose-built approach to Platform Operations for Sitecore simplifies operational management and accelerates the delivery of digital customer experiences,” explains Ben Shapiro, Dataweavers CEO. “That frees up the time and resources organizations need to innovate and deliver customer value.”

To assist in future innovation and improve the way it delivered its products, the company wanted a partner to help scale functionality in these key areas:

• Centralizing scalable performance and security management across unlimited customer domains
• Securing VPN-free user access to applications
• Simplifying platform deployment and SSL and DNS automation

“As our business grew, we realized that automating traffic management, security controls, and certificate services would vastly improve our customers’ security posture and lighten our load managing sophisticated and typically difficult-to-maintain systems,” says Shapiro.
“Cloudflare provided a single robust, automatable solution that could integrate into our existing infrastructure automation, simplify our customer onboarding, and improve our overall security and administrative processes.”

Cloudflare for SaaS — enabling scalable performance across multiple customer installations

Dataweavers’ connectivity cloud journey began with the company deploying Cloudflare content delivery services on the global network. The company’s goal was to accelerate content delivery across its entire roster of enterprise clients. With direct connections to over 13,000 networks worldwide, and server facilities in 310 cities across more than 120 countries, the centrally managed, customizable Cloudflare CDN provided Dataweavers’ clients with tangible performance gains while reducing bandwidth costs.

“Cloudflare significantly reduces the load on our clients’ infrastructures,” says Shapiro. “All of our customers report improved performance for both their regional and international websites and services.”

Quantifying those gains, the company reports that by optimizing its Azure/Sitecore platform architecture and passing public traffic through Cloudflare’s global network, it increases its customers’ page load performance by over 250%.

“Cloudflare plays a pivotal role in our ability to provide our clients with enhanced performance and lower bandwidth costs,” Shapiro says. “It offers the widest and most easily managed network coverage possible, and it does it at an excellent price point.”

Dataweavers also uses Workers — secure, scalable, and easily deployed serverless technology on the Cloudflare Developer Platform — to move applications out onto the global network and further improve the speed its clients can deliver services.

“Workers and Cloudflare Image Optimization allow us to do much of our processing right at the edge, without roundtrips to origin servers,” says Shapiro. “That reduces costs and improves the end-user experience by speeding up frequent requests, authentications, and image processing and delivery tasks.”

Centralized customer web and application security for a growing global customer base

Building on its success in enhancing the performance of its clients’ digital user experiences, Dataweavers doubled down on Cloudflare, expanding its connectivity cloud and implementing Cloudflare's portfolio of centrally administered application security products, specifically the Cloudflare web application firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, and bot management. Using the Cloudflare application services, the company mitigated its customers’ exposure to malicious traffic, securing customer installations previously vulnerable to attacks and downtime.

“Protection against Bots, DDoS, and other online attacks have always been a part of our services, we decided to transition to technology that was able to support the scale of growth in our business.” Shapiro says. “Now we automatically deploy Cloudflare to our clients through the Azure Marketplace, providing centrally administered security across all of our managed solutions — it has completely turned around customers suffering regular bot and DDoS outages.”

In specific cases, Cloudflare reduced malicious traffic to origin from up to 72000 requests daily.

Secure ‘work from anywhere’ access to internal tools and sensitive infrastructure

With a growing number of its client enterprises offering their workforce hybrid, remote, and home-based alternatives to working from the office behind a protected internal network, Dataweavers needed a secure, performant, auditable, and simple solution to provide its clients with access to information-sensitive environments like databases, production systems, and legacy toolsets. Wanting to avoid maintenance-intensive and potentially insecure traditional solutions, the Dataweavers SecOps teams turned to Cloudflare’s SASE platform to implement Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).

“Due to the popularity of work from home, we required a more robust, dynamic, and secure solution than VPN tunnels or IP safelists,” says Shapiro. “Cloudflare provided a clean, low-friction and low-overhead, identity-based approach for developers, creators, and management to work on and review projects and enhancements from anywhere.”

Streamlining platform deployment and customer onboarding

As providers of turnkey collaborative DXP platforms, rapid deployment, and seamless customer onboarding are critical to Dataweavers' success in a marketplace where time to market is a key metric. Cloudflare for SaaS plays a pivotal role in the company's ability to implement and configure its platforms and services rapidly.

“We are always looking for a more frictionless method of onboarding new customers,” says Shapiro. “Cloudflare has given us a method of managing the complexity of DNS management and SSL certificate maintenance, ensuring our customers get up and running quickly and stay safe from costly downtime in the future.”

Using Cloudflare to automate the SSL commissioning process, the company can provision new customer websites and domains at speed while ensuring its existing website certificates never expire due to inattention.

Based on its positive experiences working with Cloudflare solutions and the Cloudflare team, Dataweavers plans to continue the partnership, working to further enhance its DXP platforms.

“Cloudflare is extremely knowledgeable, responsive, and willing to find flexible solutions,” concludes Shapiro. “I’m looking forward to working even more closely with the team to solve the unique challenges we encounter as we build more innovative products for our customers.”