Cyber Defense as a Strategic Investment: Introducing Global Edge Security

Security breaches continue to make headlines for all the wrong reasons.

From leading retailers to airlines to the restaurants we frequent every day, no business is immune from the threat of a cyber attack. To make matters worse, the volume and sophistication of these attacks are increasing year after year. In the last quarter of 2017 alone, the use of nefarious methods such as SQL injections, cross-site scripting and HTTP floods nearly doubled, costing businesses around the world an estimated $600 billion annually, according to a report by McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Unfortunately, today’s businesses face an evolving and growing list of security concerns. Organizations that fail to secure their digital experiences are increasingly vulnerable to attack, which can result in a negative impact on brand reputation, revenue and an increase in customer churn.

Securing your site against these threats isn’t a set practice, it’s more like a moving target. New methods and attacks exploiting weaknesses within your site and applications are discovered every day. The need for an application-level security solution that defends against new breeds of exploits is a must-have when it comes to reducing your overall business risk and protecting your revenue.

ENTER GLOBAL EDGE SECURITY BY WP ENGINE

Against this backdrop of growing security concerns, WP Engine is stepping in to provide customers with a high-powered security solution: Global Edge Security, which offers enterprise-grade cyber defense built specifically to secure your WordPress site.

Created together with Cloudflare, the leading Internet performance and security company, this new security package combines the intelligence and expertise that WP Engine has gained from serving more than 80,000 global customers with Cloudflare’s web application firewall (WAF), distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, content delivery network (CDN) and its global edge network, which spans across more than 70 countries. Together, these services can help you deliver secure, scalable digital experiences using your WordPress site.

This new offering also means you can gain access to the best security protection against the top OWASP security vulnerabilities, nefarious intrusion methods such as SQL injections and cross-site scripting, as well as DDoS attacks that threaten to black out your digital business—all brought to you by the leading brands in WordPress and cloud security. Global Edge Security also mitigates common issues such as comment spam, botnet traffic and crawlers.

By harnessing Cloudflare’s global network, you effectively insert a buffer between all web traffic—be it nefarious or not—and your website and the WP Engine server it resides on. Think of the Cloudflare layer as a filter for bad traffic, blocking known or identifiable bad actors before they reach your site. By adding things like Cloudflare’s CDN to the package of solutions, vetted, legitimate visitors that do reach your site receive faster page load times than ever before.     

The Global Edge Security package includes the following four components:

Managed Web Application Firewall (WAF): WAF rule sets tailored and managed to identify new attack patterns and create rules accordingly. Managed WAF protects against both WordPress-specific threats and emerging vulnerabilities, mitigates threats at the edge and automatically updates to respond to newly-discovered threats.

Advanced DDoS Mitigation: Harness Cloudflare’s powerful network for protection against DDoS attacks. Advanced DDos Mitigation protects origin infrastructure by detecting and dropping volumetric attacks at the edge of the Cloudflare Anycast network, which provides highly efficient network routing.

SSL/TLS: Secure and speed up your site with HTTPs and prevent pages from displaying the “not secure” label per Chrome v.68 updates. With SSL/TLS management, web traffic passes through the global network to prevent unwanted breaches, and site encryption keeps your WordPress site safe from prying eyes.  

Cloudflare CDN: Cloudflare’s CDN relies on a global network to accelerate security and site performance at the global level. Using a CDN reduces site latency and enables faster delivery in the face of high traffic volume or network congestion for an enhanced, consistent experience.

By packaging these components together into a single solution, WP Engine is providing customers with a simplified approach to securing their WordPress sites. In doing so, we’ve made it easier for you to protect your most valuable digital assets—the customer experience, their trust in your brand and your revenue—with enterprise-level security intelligence built on the combined experience and expertise of WP Engine and Cloudflare.

Today’s evolving security threats mean security must be top of mind for every organization, and by taking concrete steps to prevent and mitigate security risks to your business, you are making a strategic investment in cyber defense and protection from these emerging threats. No security plan can prevent 100% of today’s cyber threats, but securing your site against the most common threats and attacks is a huge step in the right direction.

Visit WP Engine to find out more about our security solutions and the ways we help keep our customers safe in the face of emerging security threats.