The challenge.
Miva, an ecommerce platform that serves a range of B2B and B2C clients, has been helping businesses realize their online sales potential since 1997. Clients accessing Miva’s solutions have a fast and reliable way of operating their ecommerce efforts, from simply getting their products online to managing inventory, order processing, fulfillment, warehousing, payments and more. Companies have been drawn to Miva for its unique ability to evolve alongside their business, allowing sellers to focus on serving customers and growing their online business.
One of those details is security, and it’s an area Miva takes seriously. Although its platform hadn’t experienced any successful DDoS or spoofing attacks, Chief Information Officer David Hubbard and his team took a proactive approach to strengthening the company’s defenses and maintaining the integrity of their clients’ ecommerce initiatives.
“We launched a proactive search for an authoritative DNS product,” Hubbard said. Despite the availability of off-the-shelf software that his team could integrate, the issue was about making the best use of developers’ time to keep Miva moving forward. “It came down to a financial equation: did it make sense to build, deploy and maintain a DNS solution in house to withstand — and potentially respond to — the magnitude of attacks we were seeing elsewhere, or to buy that reassurance with a specialized commercial provider that has the availability, reliability, and resistance to attack we were looking for?”
The Vercara solution.
To maintain its focus on further developing the Miva ecommerce platform, its core competency, Miva elected to outsource the management of DNS to Vercara. Vercara filled two critical criteria to begin the conversation: a capacity to accommodate a high volume of requests and a high resistance to DDoS attacks. Vercara UltraDNS service furnished a scalable solution and tested experience, providing the level of assurance Miva required.
According to Hubbard, “The real factor that made it possible to proceed with Vercara was its API, which made it very simple to interact with the UltraDNS service.” Miva developers found the API mature and easy to work with, concluding that Vercara UltraDNS could replace the current infrastructure with little authoring on the software side. This ease of transition further freed Miva developers to continue enhancing its e-commerce platform for a growing clientele. At the same time, the shift was seamless for Miva customers, making no impact on the speed, safety or reliability of their e-commerce activities.
The outcome.
“I can happily say that having been a customer for three-and-a-half years, we have never experienced any interruption in service with Vercara UltraDNS,” said Hubbard. Despite the many diverse customer domains hosted on UltraDNS services through Miva, Hubbard notes that his team has received unwavering support from Vercara’s customer service and has easily accessed necessary audits and reports through the company’s online portal.
As Miva scales up and its clients grow in number and in brand awareness, UltraDNS will play a significant role in maintaining business continuity on all fronts. Hubbard remarked, “We wanted to get ahead of the scale of DDoS attacks occurring before our clients became targets. Vercara [formerly Neustar] UltraDNS is helping us do that.”
Key Takeaway: Vercara UltraDNS offers protection for Miva clients against the growing magnitude of DDoS attacks in the e-commerce space and takes proactive steps to mitigate risk.
