IBM Cloud Works with Cloudflare to Help Clients Modernize and Deliver Secured Cloud Infrastructure

IBM Cloud and Cloudflare have been working together since 2018 to integrate Cloudflare application security and performance products natively into IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud Internet Services (CIS) has customers across a wide range of industry verticals and geographic regions but they also have several specialist groups building unique service offerings.

The IBM Cloud team specializes in serving clients in highly regulated industries, aiming to ensure their resiliency, performance, security and compliance needs are met. One group that Cloudflare has been working with recently is IBM Cloud for Financial Services. This group extends the capabilities of IBM Cloud to help serve the complex security and compliance needs of banks, financial institutions and fintech companies.

As malicious bot attacks get more sophisticated and manual mitigations become more onerous, a dynamic and adaptive solution is required for enterprises running Internet facing workloads. With Cloudflare Bot Management on IBM Cloud Internet Services, the aim is to help IBM clients protect their Internet properties from targeted application abuse such as account takeover attacks, inventory hoarding, carding abuse and more. Bot Management will be available in the second quarter of 2023.

Threat actors specifically target financial services entities with Account Takeover Attacks, and this is where Cloudflare can help. As much as 71% of login requests are seen coming from bots (Source: Cloudflare Data) Cloudflare’s Bot Management is powered by a global machine learning model that analyses an average of 45 million HTTP requests a second to track botnets across the Cloudflare network. Cloudflare’s Bot Management solution has the potential to benefit all IBM CIS customers.

IBM Cloud has been a leader when it comes to providing solutions for the financial services industry and has developed several key management solutions that are designed so clients only need to store their private keys in custom built devices.

The IBM CIS team wants to incorporate the right mix of security and performance, which necessitates the use of cloud-based DDoS, WAF, and Bot Management. Specifically, they wanted to incorporate the powerful security tools that were offered through IBM’s Enterprise-level Cloud Internet Services offerings. When using a cloud solution, it is necessary to proxy traffic which can create a potential challenge when it comes to managing private keys. While Cloudflare adopts strict controls to protect these keys, organizations in highly regulated industries may have security policies and compliance requirements that prevent them from sharing these private keys.

Cloudflare built Keyless SSL to allow customers to have total control over exactly where private keys are stored. With Keyless SSL and IBM’s key storage solutions, the company aims to help enterprises benefit from the robust application protections available through Cloudflare’s WAF, including Cloudflare Bot Management, while still retaining control of their private keys.