Enhancing security and performance with Cloudflare

Delivering fast, secure, and reliable digital services is an ongoing challenge for public sector organisations. As the volume of web traffic increases and automated threats become more sophisticated, maintaining service availability under pressure is essential. To support this, we've now opened the possibility for your GOSS Digital Platform to be better protected and supported using Cloudflare, a globally recognised platform for web performance and security. This powerful enhancement helps GOSS clients add extra layers of protection, not just against malicious DDoS attacks and the exponential rise in AI bot traffic, but also by reducing server load and improving speed and stability.

Why Cloudflare?

While our AWS hosting environment already includes some built-in protections against DDoS activity, Cloudflare brings a deeper level of traffic filtering and performance optimisation. This move is part of a wider approach to strengthen resilience across the platform in response to rising DDoS activity and other web-based threats. With Cloudflare in place, inbound traffic is no longer routed directly to GOSS production servers. Instead, it passes through Cloudflare's infrastructure, which evaluates each request before forwarding it to the specific site. This setup enables:

• Protection against DDoS attacks and malicious bots
• Filtering of non-compliant crawlers that ignore robots.txt
• Faster, more reliable content delivery for end users
• Better resilience during sudden traffic spikes

Mitigating harmful traffic, before it reaches you

From basic scrapers to large-scale coordinated attacks, public sector websites are frequent targets for unwanted traffic. Cloudflare helps manage this risk by identifying and blocking suspicious traffic before it reaches your infrastructure. In recent times, for those GOSS clients who are already making use of this new service, Cloudflare has handled over 73 million requests to GOSS-hosted websites, with more than 12 million of those being mitigated. That means they were blocked or challenged before they were able to hit the GOSS clients' web servers. For some sites, up to 65% of incoming, non-legitimate traffic was filtered out, largely comprising bots, scanners, and other automated sources. By stopping this traffic before it arrives, Cloudflare:

• Reduces the risk of outages or slowdowns
• Protects your backend systems
• Allows genuine users to access services without disruption

Faster sites, lower load

Cloudflare also improves performance by storing and delivering common content, like images and files, closer to your users. These assets are served directly from Cloudflare's global edge network, meaning users receive content faster and your servers handle less. For many GOSS clients, this results in millions of legitimate requests being served from cache, never touching the origin server. Ultimately helping to deliver:

• Faster, better browsing experience for all site users and visitors
• A smoother, more responsive browsing experience for users
• Less strain on backend systems, improving overall site efficiency

Built-in resilience for traffic surges

Websites often see unexpected spikes in traffic, whether from seasonal activity, local events, or media coverage. These surges can overwhelm infrastructure if not properly managed. Cloudflare absorbs this variability, automatically scaling to maintain performance. Even during sharp increases in demand, the platform keeps services available and responsive by distributing traffic efficiently and filtering out unwanted noise.

Get started with Cloudflare

Cloudflare is available as part of any GOSS Digital Platform option and can be enabled for any hosted client site. The service is fully managed by our support team, with no changes required to your existing publishing processes or infrastructure. This integration provides:

• Additional protection against malicious and unwanted traffic
• Improved speed and performance for end users
• Increased resilience during periods of high demand
• A low-maintenance, supported service, fully integrated with your GOSS SaaS provision

If you'd like to know whether Cloudflare is currently enabled on your site(s), or if you're interested in exploring how this new service management expansion could better support your digital services, please contact your GOSS Account Manager for more details.