The Hindu Group

The Hindu Group provides responsive, engaging digital experiences for millions of online readers while enhancing security with Cloudflare

For more than 145 years, The Hindu Group has been India’s most trusted media house. Today, the organization oversees seven print publications with more than 20 million readers plus over 20 digital products, which have 50 million unique visitors.

Despite the organization’s prominent position in the media industry, The Hindu Group’s leaders know that online readers have high expectations for digital experiences. If it takes more than a few seconds to load a news publication’s webpage, many readers will simply give up and click to a competing site.

To deepen reader engagement, The Hindu Group’s team knew that they had to improve website performance and enhance experiences. “We wanted to ensure optimal page response times for users while seamlessly integrating emerging web technologies,” says Suresh Vijayaraghavan, CTO at The Hindu Group.

Maintaining security was also essential. Like many media online properties, The Hindu Group’s websites are frequent targets of attacks. “DDoS attacks are a widespread industry challenge, but our primary concern is malicious bots aggressively crawling millions of pages on our news portals,” says Vijayaraghavan. “Strengthening protection at the edge and ensuring data privacy are top security priorities.”

Meeting rigorous performance criteria with Cloudflare

In 2019, the organization’s IT group evaluated content delivery network (CDN) services that might help enhance performance for one of the company’s primary publication websites. Cloudflare was the clear winner.

“Our goal was to deliver pages with a response time of under four seconds,” says Poonkuyilan. “We evaluated multiple solutions that could improve performance without requiring changes to our backend application logic or internal processes. Only Cloudflare met our criteria.”

The IT team particularly liked the ability to implement additional cloud-native services from the same platform. “Competing vendors required separate subscriptions for CDN and security services, which would have added costs and complexity,” says Poonkuyilan. “With Cloudflare, several features were all part of the base package.”

Boosting website performance by 60% and maintain revenue flows

Implementing Cloudflare as a CDN had a rapid and dramatic effect on website performance. That performance improvement is helping to keep readers engaged and revenue flowing. “Cloudflare’s CDN significantly improved website performance, delivering a 60% increase in speed compared to our previous solution,” says Poonkuyilan. “While speed alone isn’t the sole driver of revenue growth, it has played a crucial role in preventing revenue loss. Ensuring faster load times and improving user experiences has minimized potential losses.”

At the same time, using the caching capabilities of a CDN have reduced networking expenses. “We’ve reduced our bandwidth traffic to our backend infrastructure by 90% using Cloudflare,” says Poonkuyilan. “As a result, we’re driving down costs with our origin end service providers.”

Strengthening security and blocking 10 million malicious requests per month

The Cloudflare platform has helped The Hindu Group combat attacks that could disrupt services, slow website performance, and even scrape copyrighted content from sites. “Before Cloudflare, mitigating attacks was a significant challenge,” says Vijayaraghavan. “We needed a solution capable of stopping threats at the edge for more effective protection. By moving to Cloudflare, we could easily implement a web application firewall [WAF] and prevent threats from reaching our infrastructure.”

The team opted for an incremental approach to deploying security services. “Initially, we implemented Cloudflare’s default security services in monitoring mode, logging all events to analyze traffic patterns and potential threats,” says Vijayaraghavan. “Based on this analysis, we gradually enabled security rules, and we found that 95% of Cloudflare’s default rules met our security expectations.”

With those rules in place, The Hindu Group is mitigating a tremendous volume of attacks. “Cloudflare blocks approximately 10 million malicious requests each month, significantly reducing our security risks,” says Vijayaraghavan.

Using Cloudflare security services also helps with future-proofing. “Security is not a one-time setup — it requires constant adaption to evolving threats,” says Vijayaraghavan. “Cloudflare continuously enhances and fine-tunes their security landscape, deploying updates across the company’s global network. With Cloudflare, we can stay ahead of shifting threats and keep our domains secure and reliable.”

Improving agility and delivering faster, more reliable experiences

In addition to using Cloudflare services to improve website performance and security, software engineers from The Hindu Group have adopted the Cloudflare Developer Platform with Cloudflare Workers to streamline development of new features.

“We explored developer services from various cloud providers,” says Vignesh Raju, software architect for The Hindu Group. “But Cloudflare makes it simple to build apps that run at the edge, closer to users. Moreover, support for frameworks on Workers is very user-friendly. With Workers, we can easily integrate new services into our digital landscape, making it our go-to solution.”

The software development team used Workers to address performance issues related to authenticating paying subscribers. “By moving authentication and asset processing to Workers, we can handle requests at the edge, before they reach the backend infrastructure,” says Raja D, Software Architect for The Hindu Group. “As a result, we can prevent unauthorized access to content while minimizing latency and reducing the load on the back end.”

Workers has also helped developers create engaging digital experiences. “With Cloudflare Workers at the core of our architecture, we’ve been able to build and maintain faster, more reliable, and highly responsive digital experiences,” says Sendhursamy Arumugam, Software Architect at The Hindu Group. “From real-time financial data to live election results, our applications run at the edge, ensuring users get the information they need instantly.”

Overall, Workers has greatly enhanced the team’s agility. “We’ve built and deployed over 80 applications using Cloudflare Workers,” says Akash R, Full Stack Developer at The Hindu Group. “It has helped us achieve a level of efficiency and flexibility that has transformed how we operate. We’re able to iterate rapidly and scale effortlessly, so we can roll out changes within minutes. And we can maintain these features with minimal overhead.”

Addressing key business goals and focusing on the future with Cloudflare

Cloudflare has enabled The Hindu Group to address multiple technology and business objectives, all from a single platform. “Cloudflare’s CDN, security, and developer services have been game-changers,” says Vijayaraghavan. “The CDN ensures fast content delivery by bringing that content closer to users. The security services protect our entire attack surface. And the developer platform provides the flexibility to deploy solutions at the edge.”

That flexibility will enable The Hindu Group to explore new use cases and find new ways to efficiently deliver robust experiences to millions of readers. “Today we are focused on integrating AI capabilities into the content creation and publishing workflows to further enhance digital experiences while increasing operational efficiency,” says Vijayaraghavan. “Cloudflare gives us the technology foundation and the strategic partnership we need to move forward.”