Groupe Profession Santé Reduces Server Load by 30% With DataDome

Server load reduced by 30%

Protection of all digital vulnerability points

Better-performing sites

Cyberfraud DDoS Media & entertainment

Profession Santé is the leading French media and services group for health professionals. The group owns a dozen media brands which, via their magazines, websites and mobile applications, aim to keep health workers in all sectors informed.

Its main title, Le Quotidien du Médecin, is the undisputed leader among French medical media, with more than two million page views per month. Le Quotidien du Pharmacien and Le Généraliste are also reference titles for the professionals they target, each site generating more than 400,000 page views per month.

The group’s editorial teams, composed of specialized journalists, publish daily news which is either accessible to all, to registered users only, or to subscribers only, depending on the type of content.

The problem: Slow site performance & denial of service

Nicolas Hannoun is Chief Information Officer for the Profession Santé Group. His discovery of the bot traffic problem was rather brutal: a denial of service attack had brought down the Quotidien du Médecin website.

“We were able to fix the problem ourselves in a sort of old-fashioned way, with configuration files, but at the time we weren’t yet fully aware of the impact that bot traffic could have on our sites,” he recalls.

What does he think motivated the hackers?

“It was probably just for the satisfaction of taking down our site. Our content isn’t particularly sensitive or controversial, and the attackers weren’t trying to hide their identity. But it was worrying, because denial of service means a drop of audience, which in turn means losing online revenue, without mentioning the impact on our reputation. The consequences can be serious.”

The solution: DataDome blocks malicious traffic

Fortunately, attacks on the group’s websites are rare. But as a result of this initial incident, the IT team members began to question the intentions of certain site visitors, and the causes of the recurring slowdowns they observed.

“All the group’s media are turning more and more towards digital, and our performance must be up to the task,” emphasizes Nicolas Hannoun. “We had a lot of questions, but few answers. We were lacking visibility of our traffic quality.”

Their attempts to manually block unwanted IP addresses having proved insufficient, DataDome’s proposal came at the right time.

The CIO was pleasantly surprised by the easy implementation and the effective onboarding process, but a bad surprise was waiting for him, too: the discovery of a huge, invisible volume of crawler bot traffic on his sites.

“Before installing DataDome, we weren’t really aware of this activity,” recognizes Nicolas Hannoun. “We believed, perhaps a bit naively, that the big media monitoring companies would identify themselves and request permission. But the DataDome dashboard made it very clear: they definitely come crawling us without letting us know.”

The results: Server load under control, performance restored

Since the DataDome solution was implemented a little less than a year ago, the volume of requests to the group’s servers has been reduced by 20 to 30%.

“As soon as we had activated the protection, our traffic became more stable, less turbulent,” acknowledges the CIO. “And I’m reassured about the use of our infrastructure. It’s important to us to have control over the traffic to our sites, and to be certain this traffic is healthy. Our bandwidth and our server resources should serve our audience, not the bots.”

The DataDome solution therefore helps him sleep more soundly, but it’s not the only advantage. “The solution provides a front office view which we didn’t have before,” he says.

It’s very interesting to get a better understanding of your traffic. And although we installed DataDome mainly to improve site performance and block attacks, we aren’t going to turn our backs on the possibility of identifying players with whom we can form partnerships.

Nicolas Hannoun, CIO of Groupe Profession Santé

Indeed, the DataDome solution enables users to identify the owners of commercial bots, a category of bots that are operated by “big data” companies such as media monitoring or SEO service providers. By default, DataDome blocks these commercial bots, but the solution also enables publishers to make contact with bot operators in order to offer access to their content… on their own terms.

“We allow access for certain commercial bots whose activity we consider beneficial, for example because they bring us additional visitors,” clarifies Nicolas Hannoun. “But the possibility to generate revenue via partnerships that offer paid access to our content is very interesting.”