Magnolia reduces platform operating cost by 40% and achieves an annual growth rate of 20% with support from Fastly

The Challenge

Growth is exciting - and it’s most valuable when it’s matched by an excellent customer experience. No matter where they are in the world, customers expect fast, seamless performance. Managing traffic spikes is critical for ecommerce and streaming clients, but protection from threats must not come at the cost of blocking legitimate users. That’s why Magnolia sought a partner who could help them continue raising the bar, while meeting and exceeding customer demands even as they scaled their own business.

The Solution

Magnolia found that partner in Fastly. Since adopting Fastly as its default CDN in 2021, Magnolia has expanded its use of Fastly solutions as business expanded. "Magnolia is growing 20% a year, even though it gets more and more difficult every year to grow in this environment. Without Fastly, it would not be possible," said Jan Haderka, Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO) for Magnolia.

One reason Magnolia has been able to scale and continually offer new features to customers is the Fastly team's foresight about the innovations that companies will need next. "Every time we needed a new feature, such as advanced rate limiting or bot protection" Haderka said, "either Fastly already had it in place or it was on the roadmap and just a matter of months until we could implement it in the platform and deliver it to customers." As a result, Magnolia accelerated development of its product to meet the unique digital experience challenges of an increasingly diverse customer base.

Protecting customers automatically with a robust security suite

Magnolia continuously strengthens its security posture and that of its customers by leveraging new Fastly features. The company migrated to Fastly's NextGen WAF at the edge. "The NextGen WAF is a great help every day," Haderka said. "Attacks keep evolving, and the Next-Gen WAF helps us protect our customers." A major advantage is that when the Magnolia security team learns something from one customer’s experience, they can propagate the rules to all their other customers in a matter of seconds. This saves a tremendous amount of time while proactively protecting their entire client base.

For many Magnolia customers, content scraping and bot attacks are big security concerns. "Many of our customers have content that would be valuable for their competitors, and we need to protect them from scraping," Haderka said. "Fastly's Bot Management has been a great feature and very useful for us in that regard." Critically, Magnolia avoids the collateral damage of blocking innocent users along with malicious bots. Magnolia automatically blocks malicious traffic using Fastly Bot Management, which immediately reacts to DDoS attacks without any manual configuration or tuning required.

Solving customer problems with fast edge solutions

Fastly's serverless platform, Compute, gives Magnolia super powers to solve problems for its most demanding customers. For example, while onboarding a new company, Magnolia resolved the broadcaster’s streaming issues within a matter of minutes. "With edge computing—with the ability to configure the rules and deploy everything with just a few clicks—we had a solution ready and propagated for them in 15 minutes, tops," said Haderka.

"Fastly has really given us an edge with new and existing customers," added Lukas Reck, Head of Cloud Services at Magnolia. "Since starting with Fastly, we've had to do much less troubleshooting on cached content, which reduces problems for our customers as well. The Fastly CDN is essential for customer success,” he added. Another benefit: integrating Fastly at the edge for both delivery and security has reduced the cost of running its platform by 40%. "That's also a tremendous saving for our customers," Haderka said.

Delivering results faster with responsive support

"Fastly has been approachable and supportive from day one," said Reck. The support from Fastly allowed Magnolia to ramp up quickly with new solutions without a long, arduous transition period. "The knowledge transfer between Fastly solution architects and our solution architects was seamless; the learning curve was not as steep as it was with other products," Reck said. He also mentioned that as a smaller Fastly customer, Magnolia is treated as well as any giant enterprise. "Fastly really delivers for its smaller customers," Reck said, "and we value that when we have problems or we're facing an attack. Fastly is right there."

Haderka agreed: "I'm always amazed at the speed of Fastly's support, especially compared to some of the other providers we work with," he said. The result is a better outcome for Magnolia's customers. "Fastly's speed helps us get things done faster. We deliver results to customers faster, and we can deliver our customers' content faster to their end users," said Haderka.

Key takeaway

Magnolia thrives in a competitive technology environment by offering its customers the security and speedy delivery they need for their own success. With Fastly as a partner, Magnolia can keep enhancing its product and develop those enhancements quickly to keep its growth on track.