Salla

Salla soars into the future of ecommerce, delivering trust to merchants and their customers with Cloudflare

Salla is a leading ecommerce platform in the Middle East. Founded in 2016 in Saudi Arabia, Salla helps merchants across industries set up and manage their online presence with payment, shipping, inventory management, and marketing, and a variety of other services. Salla is one of the fastest growing SaaS businesses in the Middle East, and as of fall 2024, Salla serves over 55,000 stores and processes sales worth over 24 billion Saudi riyal.

Challenge: Balancing security with efficiency in the fast-moving world of ecommerce

As Salla has grown, the organization has recognized the need to invest more in security. Processing more customer data and payments has made Salla an increasingly popular target for threat actors. For example, when ecommerce surged during the 2020 pandemic, Salla faced over ten cyber attacks weekly, which demanded significant time and effort to mitigate.

Growth also strained operational efficiency for Salla’s IT and security. As Salla launched new web content and public-facing applications, the company wanted a more centralized, efficient way to manage its online presence without investing in infrastructure. And as Salla served more customers in more regions, the company wanted to ensure that online content was served reliably with low-latency. Plus, the shift to remote work in 2020 forced Salla to reimagine how it could streamline access for its employees to corporate resources to get their jobs done.

To address these challenges, Salla began their journey with Cloudflare in 2017 with the basic plan. Three years into the partnership, Salla upgraded to become an Enterprise customer, improving security and efficiency across their public-facing web platform and their internal workforce as the business has grown.

Securing Salla’s platform against cyber attacks

Cloudflare DNS played a pivotal role in protecting Salla’s platform. With built-in DDoS protection, Salla’s platform was shielded from volumetric attacks that could disrupt service availability. Cloudflare’s Anycast network, which routes DNS requests to the nearest data center, ensures high availability and low latency for users worldwide, which is essential for ecommerce platforms like Salla, where downtime directly impacts revenue.

“Before implementing Cloudflare's security measures, we faced over 10 cyber attacks per week,” explains Salah Alkhwlani, Chief Technology Officer at Salla. “After deploying Cloudflare, successful attacks were reduced to near zero, significantly enhancing our security posture.”

From an operational perspective, the implementation of Cloudflare DNS enabled Salla to centralize and streamline DNS management across hundreds of domains from a single platform, reducing management complexity, improving process efficiency, and empowering Salla's IT team to concentrate on other critical areas of the business such as scaling efficiently and ensuring campaign readiness.

“Leveraging Cloudflare's DNS infrastructure meant we didn't need to invest in our own infrastructure, optimising our resources and ensuring cost efficiency, which was crucial for managing our extensive domain portfolio while maintaining high security,” says Alkhwlani.

Recognizing the need for swift and seamless media delivery, Salla used the Cloudflare global network to ensure that videos on their platform reached customers instantaneously, regardless of location. “The Cloudflare CDN delivered a significant 50% improvement in media content delivery speed,” Alkhwlani states. “This enhancement was not just a technical upgrade, but a strategic necessity that kept users engaged and informed, directly impacting sales and customer satisfaction, especially during major promotional events.”

Beyond accelerating content delivery, Cloudflare was instrumental in maintaining the high performance of Salla's platform, demonstrating that millisecond improvements make a significant difference. Its ability to handle large volumes of traffic efficiently meant that merchants could confidently launch major campaigns without worrying about slowdowns or interruptions. Customers experienced a smooth and responsive platform, which translated into better user experiences and higher conversion rates.

Implementing Cloudflare Load Balancing and Bot Management helped Salla reduce latency, enhance connection stability, and ensure secure platform operations even under heavy traffic loads. These solutions provided merchants and their customers with a consistent and positive user experience, while also safeguarding the platform against malicious attacks.

“In terms of cost efficiency, we benefited significantly from the flexibility of working with Cloudflare,” Alkhwlani adds. “By consolidating CDN-related expenses under a single contract, we achieved a 60% reduction in costs, which provided us with the cash flow to reinvest in other key areas, fostering further growth and innovation.”

Supporting secure remote access

Salla also turned to Cloudflare to secure access for its remote workforce. Specifically, Salla implemented Cloudflare Access, a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) service, to verify employees based on identity and other context before granting access to internal applications. For end users, the authentication experience is smooth and streamlined, unlike traditional remote access tools like VPNs which can be slow and often require passwords.

“As our team members work remotely from 6 to 7 cities across Saudi Arabia, implementing Cloudflare Access gives us peace of mind. It allows our team to securely access online resources as needed, even as they travel between cities, helping us achieve greater productivity remotely,” Alkhwlani shares.

By reducing risk with this Zero Trust approach, Salla has felt more confident to recruit, hire, and onboard talent from across the Middle East. For Salla, securing remote work has enabled the flexibility to bring on more diverse skilled professionals and drive the company’s growth and innovation.

Gearing up to bring Salla’s ecommerce ambitions to life

Salla's partnership with Cloudflare has been transformative, significantly enhancing security and operational efficiency. Building on this solid foundation, Salla continues to implement solutions designed to help them scale efficiently, handle increasing traffic and operational demands, and provide a seamless customer experience.

“Our vision at Salla remains focused on continuous improvement and innovation, with a strong emphasis on security, scalability, and stability to build trust and reliability,” Alkhwlani says. “As we scale our business, Cloudflare will continue playing a significant role in providing the support we need to achieve our goals.”