The client

As well as a leading premiership football club, West Ham United FC (WHUFC) is a global business with millions of fans around the world demanding always-on access to live content, online merchandise and ticketing 24/7.

The website needs to be secure and be able to perform whether it’s a match day with a 10x spike in traffic, a manic day in the summer transfer window or when the millions of global fans are buying merchandise.

On the pitch, a premier league football club demands the latest technology to ensure the team’s performance is at an optimum level, tracking player analytics and telemetry data.

The challenge

Following the breakdown of the relationship with the previous partner, our team not only took over the management of the current vendors but also provided access to their trusted network of partners in order to quickly improve performance, both in the overall hyper-converged infrastructure and but also in specific areas such as cyber security, which was a growing issue for WHUFC as they become increasingly successful on and off the pitch.

As the partnership has developed, West Ham United has entrusted and assigned a host of different projects with the renewed confidence of a timely delivery and reductions in downtime.

The solution

As West Ham United’s official virtual and private network provider, we support them with a range of services, as well as growing their technical capability, delivering a more stable and secure infrastructure.

We provide West Ham with a whole host of services such as:

  • Provision of their hyper-converged infrastructure platform, in partnership with Nutanix.
  • Provision of a fully managed cyber security platform, which includes an outsourced SOC, in partnership with CrowdStrike.
  • Provision of email security that utilises Mimecast.
  • Hosting the club’s main corporate website, which includes the integration of other third parties for merchandise and ticketing. This also includes the provision of complex load balancing and content delivery networks to ensure the best performance and experience for West Ham’s global following.
  • Providing CCTV systems at the WHUFC training ground.
  • Procuring standard hardware and software.

For the website, our first action was to switch West Ham onto the Cloudflare Global Network to improve the core security of its website and mobile applications. The migration included implementing Cloudflare DNS services, the Web Application Firewall (WAF), and page rules to filter and redirect traffic. We also adopted Cloudflare DDoS mitigation – a proactive measure to strengthen its security posture – and we enhanced the website’s match-day performance by utilising the Cloudflare Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to handle the club’s peak traffic loads.

“The biggest impact has been to create a more secure and stable infrastructure within the company.”

Mo Ali, IT Director at West Ham United

The results

Working with our team since 2020, we’ve helped WHUFC to become more secure, which has lead to a more stable digital environment within the company overall.

Mo Ali, IT Director at West Ham United, said: “The biggest impact has been to create a more secure and stable infrastructure within the company.”

The corporate website now has greater stability by eliminating unexpected downtime, together with better accessibility and improved overall functionality via the introduction of the latest technology into the user journeys.

As a result of managing the website traffic so efficiently, there’s a cost saving for WHUFC with reduced hosting fees. With improved website performance eliminating the opportunity for lost merchandise and ticket revenue due to site outages and poor load times, it has significantly reduced cloud hosting costs with 93% of match day requests offloaded to Cloudflare, coping with 10x traffic surges absorbed and crucially maintaining 100% uptime when they arise.

Mo Ali said: “The Cloudflare network delivers all web content to the West Ham fan base. Because we can offload that traffic, Cloudflare radically reduces the number of hits we take: in one 24-hour match day peak, the West Ham site received 11.5 million requests. Cloudflare handled over 93% of them.”

The CrowdStrike and Mimecast deployments within the cyber security platform have had a significant impact on the protection against cyber security threats and vulnerabilities during a time when attacks are becoming increasingly complex and WHUFC’s exposure as a club is making them more of a target. The hyper-converged infrastructure which has improved the overall performance of internal systems and the delivery of applications across the board.

The replacement CCTV camera network now enables improvements within the team to be logged and monitored – a previous unresolved and ongoing issue.