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Case Study: Porsche Informatik Secures and Automates 3000+ Dealer Websites with Cloudflare

Porsche Informatik relies on Cloudflare to manage traffic for its brand and dealer network, protect its websites from the internet, and automate cloud migration tasks.  

Porsche Informatik is a subsidiary of Europe’s largest and most successful automotive distributor in Europe, Porsche Holding Salzburg, and develops groundbreaking software solutions for the mobility of the future. Its over 180 customized software solutions — serve users in 34 countries across four continents, and has been part of the Volkswagen Group since March 2011. 

Volkswagen Group owns some of the continent’s most recognizable and prestigious automotive brands. These include Porsche and Volkswagen, Audi, Bentley, CUPRA, Lamborghini, SEAT, and ŠKODA. 

As Porsche Holdings’ full-service IT and technical services supplier, Porsche Informatik builds and maintains an international sales and support infrastructure that includes automobile dealership management, vehicle financing, distribution, and logistics planning systems. 

To achieve a safe, seamless transition to the cloud, Porsche Informatik had a series of very specific goals. These included: 

  • Securing web assets and customer domains against increasingly sophisticated malicious Internet activity 
  • Ensuring resilience and high availability in the face of unstable international network conditions to promote and retain customer trust   
  • Automating domain migration and SSL management processes 
  • Complying with European and international data localization regulations and best practices 

Porsche Informatik began its Cloudflare journey in 2022 with a series of smaller-scale tests and proofs of concept (POCs). However, with the outbreak of the Ukrainian conflict, it shifted from evaluating Cloudflare to implementing the Cloudflare WAF and Application services and Advanced DDoS Protection across all of its public websites, endpoints, and applications. 

Porsche Informatik and Cloudflare began their enterprise partnership based on the success of this real-world trial by fire. Porsche Informatik’s goal was to leverage the connectivity cloud and Cloudflare’s integrated performance, developer, and application services to streamline and simplify its full-scale cloud transformation.   

Because website and application performance are key drivers of consumer confidence, improving the customer experience topped Porsche Informatik’s list of transformation priorities.  

To bolster that customer trust, Porsche Informatik began enhancing its customer experience. By transferring its web content and assets to the Cloudflare global network and leveraging Cloudflare’s 310 data centers in over 120 countries around the world, Porsche Informatik can engage with its customers at the point of service through  13,000 ISP, cloud, and enterprise network service providers.    

For Porsche Informatik’s international network of customers, dealers, and service technicians the improvements were unmistakable. Augmenting the CDN using Cloudflare Load Balancing, Argo Smart Routing, Cloudflare R2 Distributed Object Storage, and Workers from the Cloudflare developer platform to build and run applications near the end-user reduced bandwidth costs and provided massive performance and usability improvements to Porsche Informatik’s online car configurator, ordering software and service queues.  

Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud also reduces the load on Porsche Informatik’s core data centers, both in the cloud and on-premises. According to Zangl, the global network now handles 95% of Porsche Informatik’s public traffic. Besides the cost savings, Cloudflare frees up enough headroom on Porsche Informatik’s local servers to efficiently fulfill other business objectives.    

With all of the Porsche Holding’s and the Volkswagen Group’s dealer, financing, and brand websites under its care, Porsche Informatik needed to find an efficient method of maintaining DNS, managing security certificates, and migrating customer website sites into the cloud. It was a daunting task, exacerbated by the fact that most of the domains were independently owned by subsidiaries. Using Cloudflare SSL for SaaS and the Cloudflare API, Zangl’s team has streamlined the cumbersome process. 

With the sites live in the cloud, SSL for SaaS automates the certificate management lifecycle and simplifies site maintenance and configuration, ensuring the web portfolio remains secure and up-to-date.    

As an automotive commerce industry institution that both sells vehicles and provides banking services, Porsche Holding Salzburg operates in a highly regulated environment. As a result, the company’s Cloud migration presented Porsche Informatik with challenges specific to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other regulatory bodies.  

Using the Cloudflare Data Localization Suite, Porsche Informatik maintains rigorous, auditable control over its data, determining precisely how and where it stores, transports, and encrypts information. Cloudflare also empowers the company to establish business rules for deploying region-specific Workers to execute its serverless applications and specify the location of data centers with authorization to inspect data for threats or anomalies.    

After working closely with Cloudflare throughout the transformation, Schulmeister expresses confidence in the partnership between the Cloudflare and Porsche Informatik teams.    

Porsche Informatik plans to continue driving innovation toward a holistic online buying and automobile ownership experience. As it advances the automotive commerce sector to align with its vision, it recognizes Cloudflare as a pivotal component of its roadmap.  

As Porsche Informatik and its clients continue to explore use cases for enhancing their products and services with emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), the company sees Cloudflare playing a pivotal role, providing solutions where cyber security and AI intersect. 

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