What does it take to keep a business online, when attacks are part of the day?

When you visit a news website, you probably don't think about what is happening behind the page you are reading.

You expect the different pages, articles and images to load.

For a large online publisher, keeping that experience available is a very different challenge.

Cloud Concept has provided Newsbeast’s hosting and ongoing support since 2015, meeting demands that go beyond those of a typical website.

Newsbeast.gr is one of the largest Greek news websites by traffic, with a platform that needs to handle large volumes of traffic, while remaining available and protected against constant attacks.

According to our Newsbeast case study, the website's edge servers handle peaks of up to 12,000 HTTPS requests per second. It also receives more than 20-30 different types of attacks every day, including attacks targeting the network layer and the application itself.

Despite this, Newsbeast has maintained 99.996% frontend uptime and 99.98% backend uptime, with no reported data breach.

So how do you keep a website online when attacks are not an occasional event, but part of the environment it operates in?

Security has to be part of the infrastructure

For a site like Newsbeast, protecting the website cannot simply mean putting a security product in front of it and moving on. Traffic needs to be examined continuously and malicious requests need to be identified before they reach the application.

This is where technologies such as Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) become important. A WAF examines web traffic and helps block malicious requests targeting the application, while an IPS can identify and prevent suspicious activity at the network level.

Cloud Concept's approach combines these layers with the underlying hosting infrastructure, monitoring and ongoing management. The aim is to keep the website running and have the environment around it protected as well. For a website receiving thousands of requests every second, that protection has to work 24/7.

What happens when something still goes wrong?

The Newsbeast infrastructure was designed to respond automatically to certain problems.

We implemented health checks and recovery scenarios within the Kubernetes environment so that, for known failure situations, the infrastructure can recover without requiring someone to intervene manually. Log analysis and automated controls were also introduced to identify and block certain unwanted activity.

The infrastructure was designed across two data centers, with the systems operating in an active-hot-standby configuration.

If one data center becomes unavailable, the second environment can take over, rather than leaving the website dependent on a single location.

Protection is not a one-time decision

The Newsbeast case started with a hosting requirement back in 2015. Over time, the platform and its requirements changed significantly. The later reengineering of the infrastructure involved moving from a monolithic application to microservices, introducing Kubernetes, redesigning the frontend and rebuilding the deployment process.

Security does not sit still while the rest of the technology changes. For businesses, that can mean combining several layers: perimeter and application protection, monitoring, managed infrastructure, secure deployment, backups and disaster recovery.

If your website is facing attacks every day, how much of your security can you realistically leave unmanaged?

At Cloud Concept, our mission is to provide continuous technical support, deliver high-quality managed services and share practical insights that help businesses manage their data more efficiently.

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