Sage

Sage helps businesses to thrive — Sage partners with Cloudflare to support the security of business management applications for millions of users

Sage is a leader in accounting, financial, HR, and payroll technology for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Its technology automates accounting, payroll and payment practices.

Supporting millions of businesses across 21 countries, Sage helps SMBs thrive in a complex digital landscape. The Sage ecosystem allows entrepreneurs to offload their administrative processes and free up time and resources to focus on core business objectives. Sage’s purpose is to knock down barriers so everyone can thrive and good security built into the products from the outset is the foundation of this.

Challenge: Securing business application access to millions of users

As providers of cloud-based financial and business management tools, Sage is responsible for the security of their clients’ financial information. It is a charge they take seriously, especially as online threats become more sophisticated and automated threats increase in frequency.

“A key cybersecurity focus is the rise of criminal groups that try to hold companies to ransom by making data unavailable or simply by profiting from stolen data,” says Sage Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Gustavo Zeidan. “Our challenge is to protect our customers’ data, as well as their own customers’ data, by staying ahead in technology evolution and anticipating changes in the threat landscape — always monitoring the environment and ensuring that Sage and our customers’ data stay secure.”

As Sage’s product portfolio grew, so did their need to secure and integrate their new offerings without hindering development efforts or user access to financial tools and information.

“We are constantly evolving our business processes and technology, and a significant part of that initiative involved a strong push towards a Zero Trust network architecture,” Zeidan explains. “We have been consistently and relentlessly decommissioning legacy ways of working and old technologies such as VPN and modernising how our business colleagues and development teams use technology to deliver their work.”

Looking for a like-minded partner dedicated to innovation, Sage chose Cloudflare to help them achieve their security and development goals.

Solution: Mitigating automated threats and reducing network complexity with Cloudflare integrated security and analysis tools

Using Cloudflare, Sage was able to reduce maintenance costs and streamline their digital footprint.

“The amount of insight we gained from Cloudflare’s integrated solutions such as DNS Analytics is impressive," says Zeidan. “With that added visibility, we could build an understanding of our footprint at the host level and make data driven business decisions on what to keep and what to decommission, enabling us to greatly simplify our external presence.”

Sage initially had adopted the core Cloudflare application services like the Web Application Firewall (WAF) and global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to bolster product performance and secure their websites and APIs. Based on their early successes, Sage began onboarding additional Cloudflare tools — like Bot Management and DDoS mitigation — to proactively defend against threats using behavioral analysis, fingerprinting, and machine learning to monitor traffic.

“Cloudflare gives us the ability to identify what is human and what is automated traffic,” says Zeidan. “That helps protect our websites from automated attacks and filter out traffic when they are attempting to use our platform in a different way it was designed for.”

Simplifying application security and development with Cloudflare Workers

With its comprehensive set of enterprise management tools, ensuring effortless access while maintaining stringent application security and protecting data for a user base of millions was critical to Sage’s success.

Today, the Cloudflare-Sage partnership extends beyond security — the Cloudflare Workers development platform gives Sage DevOps an environment in which they can innovate and safely test and deploy additional layers of code straight from the network edge.

"Cloudflare Workers has brought immense flexibility to our engineering teams," says Zeidan. "This solution alone enabled operations teams to provide fast response to various architecture challenges without having to go anywhere near application code or making changes to core infrastructure.”

Sage’s and Cloudflare share a focus on innovation and creating solutions that bring clear benefits to their end users.

“Sage has the ambition to knock down barriers and transform the way people think and work, enabling their organisations to thrive.”