Jumia provides internet services to its e-commerce customers and entrepreneurs in 22 countries in Africa. Jumia’s ecosystem of digital services are used by up to 15 million users per month.
“As a leading e-commerce provider, we’ve been targeted by DDoS attacks in the past,” said Henrique Alves of the Jumia Group. “It’s unacceptable in our industry for a website to be down a single minute, let alone half an hour or more due to a DDoS event. Any outage in service would result in lost revenues for Jumia and its merchants, not to mention a bad user experience for our customers.”
A Growth E-commerce Landscape
To keep pace with the nascent e-commerce marketplace in Africa and make sure his site remained stable, Alves and his IT team turned to Incapsula for CDN and DDoS protection services.
“We needed a partner who could think out-of-the-box and adapt to the unique conditions we face,” he said. “So far, Incapsula has shown that they are up to the challenge.”
E-commerce is still relatively new in Africa. And because of this, Jumia was having difficulty predicting a benchmark for performance in their marketplace.
Jumia needed to be prepared for sudden spikes in traffic (like a viral marketing campaign, for example) and still be able to detect and mitigate an unforeseen DDoS attack.
“Marketing campaigns and special sales can trigger unpredictable traffic patterns which some solutions may mistakenly interpret as being a DDoS attack,” said Alves.
A key aspect of the Incapsula WAF is its ability to differentiate between legitimate website visitors and automated web bots that can mimic human behavior to wage DDoS attacks. This feature helps web operators manage traffic spikes during campaigns without hindering the user experience for legitimate customers.
The Need for a Flexible and Intelligent Solution
The Incapsula team onboarded the Jumia network (including 120 different websites spanning 22 countries) in just one week. Our engineering team worked with Jumia to smooth out implementation and tune the API to suit Jumia’s specific needs.
Today, the Incapsula service is being used to secure and accelerate Jumia’s full e-commerce operations, a situation that Alves and his crew were originally looking for.
“Being able to use one integrated system for DDoS protection, CDN and web application firewall for all of our African operations was a huge benefit,” he said. “The fact that all IT teams across the Jumia ecosystem are using the same tools and API creates a lot of synergies, simplifying operations and reducing costs.”
Results and Benefits
Jumia consolidated its multiple systems and vendors by deploying Incapsula. As a result, it was able to reduce costs while simplifying operations and maintenance.
Alves and his ops team could also focus on e-commerce rather than security through always-on detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks by Incapsula.
To find out more about how Jumia implemented Incapsula, you can read our case study.
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