Signal Sciences > Case Studies > Sauce Labs Leverages IoT for Enhanced Web Application Security

Sauce Labs Leverages IoT for Enhanced Web Application Security

Technology Category

Cybersecurity & Privacy - Application Security
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud

Applicable Industries

Electrical Grids
National Security & Defense

Use Cases

Supply Chain Visibility
Tamper Detection

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

Sauce Labs is a leading provider of the world’s largest continuous testing cloud for web and mobile applications. The company has been named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list for four consecutive years, demonstrating its significant growth and impact in the technology sector. Sauce Labs helps businesses ensure that their mobile applications and websites work flawlessly on every device, operating system, and browser, delivering an impeccable digital experience to their users. The company's services are critical to businesses in the digital age, where seamless user experience can be a key differentiator.

The Challenge

Sauce Labs, a leading provider of continuous testing cloud for web and mobile applications, was facing a significant challenge in protecting its web applications distributed across a hybrid cloud environment with different application stacks. The company, which has been named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list for four consecutive years, helps businesses ensure their mobile applications and websites work flawlessly on every device, operating system, and browser. However, the company was grappling with potential attack vectors including click fraud and abuse of its free trial virtual machine offering. The Senior Director of Product Security, John Kennedy, was keen on finding a solution that would provide a robust defense against these threats.

The Solution

Sauce Labs turned to Signal Sciences for a solution to their security challenges. The company immediately gained intelligent blocking of web threats from Signal Sciences and used the visibility to identify unique application abuse, which they thwarted using Power Rules. Signal Sciences provided unified visibility with clearer insights for applications running across different stacks and hybrid cloud environments. Although Sauce Labs had extensive logging in place for all its resources, the team didn’t have the bandwidth to monitor logs for suspicious events. Signal Sciences applies descriptive signals to each request, enabling the team to see a picture of what is going on in real time. Furthermore, Sauce Labs was able to curb abuse of their virtual machine service by configuring a Power Rule to restrict access to specific pages based on geo-blocking.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Signal Sciences' technology brought about significant operational benefits for Sauce Labs. The company gained a real-time view of what was happening with their resources, which helped them focus their efforts more effectively. The use of Power Rules allowed them to curb unique application abuse, particularly the misuse of their free trial virtual machine service. Furthermore, the simplicity of Signal Sciences' technology compared to hardware appliance models they had used in the past made it an easy sell to other teams within the company. Both TechOps and Engineering were on board after reviewing Signal Sciences’ architecture with the NGINX module and web server agent, demonstrating the solution's ease of integration and potential for enhancing operational efficiency.

Quantitative Benefit

Immediate intelligent blocking of web threats
Real-time visibility into suspicious events
Effective curb on abuse of free trial virtual machine service through geo-blocking