GovCMS Web Protection Services
GovCMS Software as a Service (SaaS) customers benefit from Web Protection Services provided by Akamai. PaaS customers can also ‘opt in’ to have Web Protection Services at an additional cost.
It's all about protection and performance
GovCMS Web Protection Services support and protect GovCMS customers from malicious cyber activity through the:
- Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Bot Manager
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
A WAF is a filter that protects against traffic attacks. It inspects all traffic before it reaches your website and protects the GovCMS environment by filtering out threats that could damage website functionality or compromise data.
The WAF performs a deep inspection of every request and response for all common forms of web traffic before it gets close to GovCMS sites. This inspection helps the WAF to identify and block threats, preventing them from reaching our servers.
The most frequent malicious attacks are usually automated. These types of threats are difficult to detect. They often mimic human traffic and go undetected. The WAF is able to detect these threats.
Even if your site isn’t high-profile, or high-traffic, it’s still susceptible to this kind of attack. The WAF is always on and ahead of traffic coming towards GovCMS websites.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection
Hackers stage DDoS attacks by hijacking unprotected computers. Sometimes this can result in the use of thousands of computers or "bots" to target a single website, web based application or even a platform. This floods the target with an enormous amount of traffic causing it to become unavailable to users. The number, scale and sophistication of attacks has grown in recent years. Government websites are constantly targeted.
GovCMS SaaS sites have DDoS protection that delivers a multi-layered defence to protect websites and web applications against DDoS attacks.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN utilises caching technology that delivers content faster from various points of presence around the world to site visitors. This means that website traffic does not always hit the GovCMS infrastructure reducing load on the environment. This was particularly critical during the height of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The GovCMS SaaS platform remained stable despite experiencing at its peak:
- 100,000 pages of content served per minute
- 187,000 concurrent users on the platform
- 2 billion hits in a month
All websites protected by a CDN can be assured of being fast and responsive to visitors. The environment is protected from excessive load that would otherwise cause risk of degraded performance or an outage.
Bot Manager
Bot Manager detects, identifies, and manages bots before they adversely affect the web application hosted at the origin servers.
GovCMS websites are kept secure
There's more to the protection than this high level overview. At the end of the day SaaS customers and PaaS customers that have ‘opted in’ can rest easy that their websites are protected on the GovCMS platform.