Fastly > Case Studies > Namely's Innovative Security Partnership with Fastly for Enhanced Web Defense

Namely's Innovative Security Partnership with Fastly for Enhanced Web Defense

Technology Category

Cybersecurity & Privacy - Intrusion Detection
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Buildings
National Security & Defense

Use Cases

Tamper Detection
Time Sensitive Networking

About The Customer

Namely is a leading HR platform that provides HR professionals with the technology, data, and support they need to help their employees and business thrive. The platform is designed to save time, avoid costly errors, and build a winning company culture. As a cloud-first, all-in-one HR platform, Namely is experiencing rapid growth and expanding its customer base. This growth has led to an increased responsibility for managing web defenses, including detection, prevention, and response. The company operates in a fast-paced agile development environment and prioritizes innovative security solutions.

The Challenge

Namely, a cloud-first, all-in-one HR platform, was experiencing rapid growth, which necessitated the prioritization of its web defense. As the customer base of Namely expanded, so did its responsibility for managing web defenses, including detection, prevention, and response. In a fast-paced agile development environment, security leader Daniel Leslie was tasked with building security and IT from scratch. He was seeking innovative ways to manage website defenses, having had experience with legacy Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). His core criteria for a solution included technical alignment, ease-of-use, best-in-class security functionality, and total cost of ownership (TCO).

The Solution

Namely chose to partner with Fastly as a component within their security architecture due to its better usability for security operation tasks, technical alignment with deployment updates and maintenance, all at a lower TCO. Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF was easy to install and onboard new personnel due to its ease of use and visibility of automated, intelligent blocking decisions. It provided real-time visibility around how their web applications were being attacked, helping to identify the attack surface. Detailed blocking decisions, coupled with integrations like PagerDuty, helped Namely fix issues faster. Fastly’s intelligent Cloud Engine created events after seeing enough malicious requests to confirm an actual attack. This reduced the time taken to detect and remediate issues. Fastly also provided the team with leverage in using an intelligent product that provided immediate blocking and actionable intelligence to dig deeper into potential threats.

Operational Impact

The partnership with Fastly has resulted in several operational benefits for Namely. The ease of use of Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF has made it easy to install and onboard new personnel, improving the efficiency of the security operations. The real-time visibility provided by the product has helped Namely understand how their web applications are being attacked, enabling them to better manage their web defenses. The detailed blocking decisions and integrations like PagerDuty have helped Namely fix issues faster, improving their response time to security events. Furthermore, the intelligent Cloud Engine has reduced the occurrence of 'alarm fatigue' by creating events only after confirming an actual attack, improving the attentiveness of the team.

Quantitative Benefit

Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF reduced the time taken to detect and remediate issues to just minutes.
Fastly’s intelligent Cloud Engine confirmed actual attacks after seeing enough malicious requests, reducing false positive alerting.
Fastly provided critical time savings in setup, equating to a low total cost of ownership.