Lazada is the largest e-commerce marketplace, number one in the Southeast Asia, providing services to customers from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Today, using technology, logistics and payment capabilities, the company unites these six countries into a single ecosystem of affordable shopping. By 2030 Lazada plans to be serving up to 300 million customers.
“We operate in an extremely dynamic market segment, where infrastructure downtime carries high financial and reputational risks. We experience moderate-level attacks every week or two. Every two to three months we record targeted attempts to disable our system with a sophisticated DDoS attack. And once or twice a year truly extreme events occur, targeted not only at the site, but at the entire network and the autonomous system.”
Lazada is the fastest growing e-commerce platform in the Southeast Asia, which means that ensuring constant accessibility to both buyers and sellers is a must. “Accessibility” is critically important in e-commerce, and, for a company, it is not only defined by continuity of access to the platform, but also by how fast and smoothly it can be accessed. Understanding the needs of the client and the high level of business risks, the company makes every effort to ensure continuous accessibility of the trading platform for visitors. That is why at the time the task was set, Lazada had already been using a solution for protection against network attacks. However, the solution applied back then was not meeting business requirements: it couldn’t continuously provide the necessary level of infrastructure protection, because the response time to attacks was too long and the recognition level was unsatisfactory, which lead to too many false positives. Communication with the technical support service was slow and inefficient: clients could not get comprehensive answers to all their questions. So, the decision was made that it was necessary to update the solution for protection against DDoS attacks.
The task set before Lazada’s team of network security experts was as follows: to ensure continuous accessibility of the e-commerce platform to users, with the minimum load on the available resources against reduced delays within the network. The following features were among the main requirements:
In the process of testing solutions from various suppliers, Qrator Labs services showed the best results in the price/quality ratio. The Lazada team focused on the implementation of the following Qrator Labs solutions:
Thanks to the Qrator Labs solutions Lazada ensured continuous availability of the trading platform by implementing the project with minimal resources. Almost all the systems operate in an automated mode and manual configuration is not required.
The solution provided by Qrator Labs for neutralizing DDoS attacks demonstrated a high response rate to requests, and the level of expertise of the technical support service fully met the clients’ requirements. The quality of the geographically distributed network of traffic filtering and DDoS attacks neutralization turned out to be much higher than that provided by the solutions of the previous vendors. The number of false positives was practically reduced to zero, and the neutralization of attempts to disable the infrastructure was transferred to the regular response mode – continued and automated leveling of threats without involving additional resources of the company. According to the company’s measurements, the solution provided by Qrator Labs also reduced delays within the network, thanks to a smart architecture and deep integration. Winning a few milliseconds is quite a positive achievement.
“We can say that the technical expertise of the support service is what makes this company stand out among all other providers of similar services on the market. The combination of such a high level of service, the speed of solving technical issues, problems and requests from our specialists makes the Qrator Labs solution, as well as the company’s technical support and network operations team, the best in the field of network accessibility and security. Since it is almost impossible to prepare for attacks and other incidents, it is extremely important that when they occur, communication remains clear, fast and professional and meets all the requirements of the client. Escalation paths during attacks and other incidents are critical, sometimes you just need to be able to call the technical director... though, in the long run, we have never done it. We are not talking about the quality of the Qrator filtering network and the ability to neutralize DDoS attacks, since for a company of our size and technical expertise the highest level of efficiency is a priority in considering a third-party solution. We cannot afford to use a service whose principle of operation is not completely comprehensible to us, not to mention doubts in reliability. But thanks to the Qrator solutions, dealing with attacks has become a routine for us: we only learn about an incident by reading the report that comes the next morning.After a year of working together with Qrator Labs, we also decided to protect our own DNS. We had some very specific requests to protect our Domain Name System, and we presented them to Qrator Labs. Within a few weeks, the tools and management options we requested were added to the Qrator solution. It can be a challenge sometimes to ask a company to create custom solutions that are only relevant for you, but when that happens and you get what you want, the feeling is fantastic. Working with a company like Qrator Labs is a wonderful opportunity to learn and improve your own product in a highly professional environment.”
