DMDC UniMAP Prioritizes Student Safety with F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Digital Management and Development Centre (DMDC) Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) uses F5 Distributed Cloud Services to enhance security, streamline monitoring, and combat website bots. The performance dashboard ensures transparency by assessing latency, alerts, visitor patterns, and server health for robust security.
Established in 2001, Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) is a prominent institution of higher learning in Malaysia. It occupies a unique and vital role as one of only four technical universities in the country, contributing significantly to the evolution of Malaysia’s higher education landscape.
Business Challenge
Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP), Malaysia's 17th public institution of higher learning, embarked on a transformative journey with a vision to become an internationally competitive technical university. To achieve this ambitious goal, it faced a series of complex challenges within its digital ecosystem, which impacted both service delivery and the overall user experience. Their legacy solution lacked visibility, essential dashboards, and monitoring data for daily website traffic.
Persistent application latency issues cast a shadow over the ideal digital learning environment for students. Additionally, the university experienced a significant increase in bot traffic which raised major concerns due to its unclear origin and intent. Attackers leveraged automation bots for data scraping, and DMDC UniMAP lacked visibility into these activities. The servers inadvertently processed malicious bot requests that were not intended for them. This surge raised red flags regarding potential data theft and security vulnerability.
The susceptibility of DMDC UniMAP to web attacks, including cross-site scripting and SQL injection, presented significant threats to sensitive information and continuity of essential operations. The rise of cross-site scripting attacks, a type of injection wherein malicious scripts are inserted into the code of a trusted application or website, emerged as a significant concern. Moreover, the absence of effective observability tools hampered timely issue detection and resolution. As the digital landscape evolved, the proliferation of API endpoints introduced additional complexity.
Solutions
Seeking an enhanced security strategy, DMDC UniMAP looked to F5 for a comprehensive, SaaS solution that would serve as a centralized safeguarding mechanism for the digital ecosystem.
F5 and DMDC UniMAP initiated a consultative journey, conducting successful proof of concept trials (POCs) to identify and address precise end-to-end latency issues within DMDC UniMAP’s applications.
F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) offers a robust dashboard solution that provided DMDC UniMAP with a unified console, delivering greater visibility and comprehensive security control. The dashboard, which provided detailed insights into user traffic, user activity, and user demographics, empowered DMDC UniMAP to effectively map the customer journey.
“The solution’s dashboard and analytics were a revelation, exposing previously hidden insights. This allowed us to fine-tune our protection, thwarting determined bots, even those adapting to our defenses, all while ensuring a seamless experience for our users,” says Ts. Nasrudin Abd Shukor, Director, Digital Management and Development Center, UniMAP.
Additionally, F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP delivered a detailed classification system for web application and API protection. This contrasted with DMDC UniMAP’s previous efforts to mitigate bots, which not only caused user friction but also proved ineffective as bots adapted with greater resilience. The bot traffic processing capabilities can now be utilised effectively by only managing intended legitimate traffic or human traffic while blocking bad traffic. The advanced Distributed Cloud Bot Defense solution classified threats based on bot types, automated defenses, monitored top attack signatures, violations, and threat campaigns. All this critical information was thoughtfully consolidated into a single security console, streamlining administrative management.
Recognizing DMDC UniMAP’s commitment to improve user experience and enhancing security control, F5 went a step further by introducing an additional layer of functionality. The performance analytics dashboard provided DMDC UniMAP with invaluable insights, including critical metrics such as application health scores and end-to-end latency visibility.
Results
#1 Enhanced visibility with a unified dashboard
With all essential data consolidated in a single location, DMDC UniMAP's teams were able to make informed decisions, troubleshoot issues more efficiently, and maintain a seamless user experience.
#2 Proactive threat management and response
F5 provided DMDC UniMAP with advanced threat detection capabilities, enabling proactive threat identification and insights into their origins. This emphasis on timely threat response became a cornerstone of DMDC UniMAP's security strategy, bolstering their overall cyber resilience.
#3 Performance optimization through analytics
The introduction of the performance analytics dashboard marked a transformative milestone in optimizing the digital infrastructure. It ensured peak performance and responsiveness, proactively addressed bottlenecks, enhanced user experience, and maintained digital service efficiency.
- Strengthened digital threat detection
- Real-time threat visibility for rapid response
- Centralized monitoring for holistic insights
- Value-added performance optimization
- Persistent latency issues impacting the ideal digital learning environment
- Surge in bot traffic raises data security concerns
- Need for timely issue detection and resolution
- Proliferation of API end points increasing complexity