London – 9^th August, 2023 – Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced that IBM Cloud Internet Services (CIS), powered by Cloudflare, has expanded its offering to include Cloudflare Bot Management, now available to help enterprises on the Enterprise Premier Plan address and combat the growing threat of malicious bot traffic.

Cloudflare and IBM Cloud have been working together since 2018, integrating Cloudflare application security and performance natively into IBM Cloud through IBM CIS, powered by Cloudflare. CIS positions customers to configure their web and Internet applications to be protected against cyber threats including DDoS attacks and data theft, while enhancing performance and reliability with load balancing, optimised routing and caching, and data exchange, as part of the CIS suite of capabilities. 

Furthering the delivery of Cloudflare Bot Management comes as bad bots continue to consume resources and overwhelm organisations, accounting for at least a quarter of all Internet traffic, according to Forrester Research, a leading global research and advisory firm. Additionally, "Bot management providers that previously specialised in ad fraud, identity fraud, or application security found that they needed to expand their offerings to support customer personas from the security, marketing, e-commerce, fraud, customer experience, and executive teams. Modern bot management tools must keep up with ever-evolving attacks, offer a range of out-of-the-box and customisable reports, and enable human end customers to transact business with little friction or frustration."

As malicious bot attacks become more sophisticated and manual mitigations become more burdensome, a dynamic and adaptive solution is required for enterprises running Internet-facing workloads. With Cloudflare Bot Management, businesses can be protected from targeted application abuse such as credential stuffing, inventory hoarding, carding abuse, and content scraping, as part of the complete Bot Management detection and mitigation offering. The Cloudflare Bot Management feature is available now for any IBM Cloud CIS customer with an Enterprise Premier Plan.

"Cloudflare and IBM Cloud Internet Services have been helping power the vast increase of Internet-facing business applications, and we're seeing more and more bot activity across the landscape. Malicious bots are part of this equation, posing significant risks and causing inefficiencies in business, from fraudulent transactions to fake attempts to make purchases," said Matt Harrell, Global Head of Channels and Alliances at Cloudflare. "These malicious activities can deprive legitimate customers from making purchases and affect a business' bottom line, not to mention potential larger risks of data loss. This is a further effort to protect operations at this critical level."

"As the threat landscape continues to grow, it's more important than ever to evolve our offerings to better support our clients in their cyber resiliency journey," said Nataraj Nagaratnam, Fellow, CTO, Cloud Security at IBM. "Both IBM and Cloudflare continue to have a mission of delivering solutions that will address costly security threats, without hindering Internet speed or business innovation. We aim to provide our clients a single integrated solution that offers both industry-leading protection and accelerated performance."

New Offering Benefits

As one of the largest and most interconnected networks in the world, Cloudflare is able to derive deep insights from analysing a wide range of traffic. Cloudflare Bot Management delivers the following for customers:

• Identify malicious bots through effective machine learning: Cloudflare Bot Management is trained on hundreds of billions of requests per day, with Cloudflare's machine learning creating a bot score for every request running through its network. The solution automatically filters out content scraping and site crawling as well as inventory hoarding and credit card stuffing.
• Gain enhanced behavioural analysis of types of Internet traffic: Analysed behaviour and detection of anomalies in an organisation's specific traffic, across all their Internet properties, provides another level of business insight.
• Reduce risk through fingerprinting: Cloudflare leverages fingerprinting from millions of diversified Internet properties to accurately classify bots but does not generate or store device fingerprints, eliminating risk to user privacy.

Since 2018, Cloudflare has been collaborating with IBM CIS to implement features that address critical Internet security challenges while delivering performance and reliability across business applications. CIS has customers across a range of industry verticals, geographic regions, and specialist groups building unique service offerings.

"With the rise of DDoS attacks and data theft, it's become important to have support that helps us meet the challenges of the ever-changing threat landscape. That's why at Liquid Reply, we called on IBM Cloud and Cloudflare to help support our security initiatives," said Davide Sarais, IT Lead at Liquid Reply. "By using IBM Cloud Internet Services, we've been able to maintain our compliance posture. The new features that are available to IBM and Cloudflare clients are exciting advancements that we hope will take our approach to security to the next level."

"I've worked in Software Engineering for 15 years. I've never seen page load times improve as site traffic increased, but Cloudflare Bot Management helped make that happen," said Dave Giunta, VP of Engineering at Home Chef.

To learn more about Cloudflare and IBM's work, check out the resources below:

• IBM Newsroom: How IBM and Cloudflare Are Helping to Mitigate Bot-Based Threats
• IBM Cloud Internet Services Powered by Cloudflare
• About IBM and Cloudflare 
• About the Cloudflare Channel Partner Program

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare's suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was awarded by Reuters Events for Global Responsible Business in 2020, named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2021, and ranked among Newsweek's Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022.