Handelsblatt Media Group

How Cloudflare is Powering Handelsblatt Media Group’s Digital Transformation

The Handelsblatt Media Group (HMG) is the leading media house for business and financial information in Germany. The Düsseldorf-based media group was founded in 1946 and stands for well-founded, independent quality journalism. With its decision-maker media properties including Handelsblatt and WirtschaftsWoche, HMG reaches more than two million readers. HMG also serves large businesses through a variety of subsidiaries, offering marketing expertise, a corporate content agency, and more.

As a marquee media property, HMG regularly faces concerted online attacks from hostile actors — and before moving to Cloudflare, they were causing major issues. Over a span of several weeks, HMG was overwhelmed multiple times by online attacks that incapacitated its origin server, rendering the site inaccessible.

Trust is paramount for news organizations, and erratic website reliability can quickly erode that trust. With no signs of the attacks abating, it was time for HMG to act.

The Cloudflare Difference

HMG’s Digital Products & Development team evaluated a variety of cloud platforms as it looked for something that could not just mitigate these hostile attacks, but would also provide benefits to performance, reliability, operational efficiency — and cost. It quickly decided that Cloudflare was the clear choice.

After a swift migration — with zero downtime — from a legacy cloud vendor, HMG enabled Cloudflare’s web application firewall (WAF) and DDoS protection to thwart hostile actors, and its reliability issues immediately ceased. Informed by the collective intelligence of millions of properties on Cloudflare’s network, Cloudflare’s firewall is continuously and automatically updated against the latest threats, using insights from attacks on any one property to better protect them all.

Now, the HMG team can focus on other priorities, like accelerating performance and finding ways to unlock more productivity from its team.

“We were looking for a provider that could stop our attackers in their tracks — and would also serve as the right partner to infuse innovation and efficiency into our organization. Cloudflare has delivered on that and more.”

— Benedikt Geuer Head of DevOps, Handelsblatt Media Group

Indeed, the more it explored Cloudflare’s platform, the more opportunities HMG saw to improve everything from its security and performance to its operational efficiency.

Powering A Digital Transformation

HMG is in the midst of fundamentally changing the way it approaches its digital strategy — which entails overhauling its infrastructure, and adapting its culture to thrive as it works to become a pioneer in digital publishing innovation.

One of the biggest wins for HMG has been Cloudflare’s deep API support, which enables HMG to programmatically configure a wide array of Cloudflare products and features. The ability to define its infrastructure with code has empowered HMG to reduce dependencies, better leverage automation, and transition to a continuous deployment process that markedly accelerates its development pipeline.

Another major benefit stems from Cloudflare’s position in the network stack, which allows it to work in tandem with — and manage policies across — any combination of on-premise and cloud infrastructure (in addition to SaaS apps). HMG still operates largely from on-premise servers, but it is in the process of embracing the public cloud — and it uses Cloudflare as an independent intermediary layer to tactically manage multiple clouds simultaneously.

“Cloudflare is streamlining our migration from on-prem to the cloud. As we tap into various public cloud services, Cloudflare serves as our independent, unified point of control — giving us the strategic flexibility to choose the right cloud solution for the job, and the ability to easily make changes down the line.”

— Dr. Isabel Wolters Chief Technology Officer, Handelsblatt Media Group

Just the Beginning

HMG has even bigger ambitions as part of its digital transformation, and Cloudflare will continue to play a leading role. Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing has contributed to a dramatic acceleration in the site’s performance, dynamically routing visitor traffic around Internet congestion. And the HMG team is currently experimenting with Cloudflare Workers, the bleeding-edge serverless platform, to enable deeper personalization.

“Handelsblatt Media Group is working toward taking a pioneering role in digital media, and Cloudflare has been an invaluable partner in that. Cloudflare’s technology is second-to-none, and it’s always building things we wish we had time to build ourselves. Even better, its customer support has been fantastic.”

— Dr. Isabel Wolters Chief Technology Officer, Handelsblatt Media Group