“The benefit went far beyond performance. Flexibility and ease in using Azion’s products to build and monitor applications is one of the company’s main differentials. Another highlight is the service and concern that Azion has for its customers”
Cezar Baldi, Chief Technology Officer at NZN.
Challenge
As the owner of several successful brands, NZN is responsible for a significant share of the digital content consumed on the Brazilian internet. On average, its websites receive 200 million pageviews and 23 million unique users every month.
The challenge becomes even greater when considering that six out of ten people increased their media consumption in 2020, while 69% of users say that an extraordinary digital experience raises their expectations for other companies.
For NZN, delivering fast access to news, videos, and other digital content is a key competitive advantage that helps the company:
- retain audiences on its pages;
- increase engagement and user retention;
- improve search engine positioning; and
- generate more clicks and views for advertisers.
Beyond performance, NZN also needed to maintain high availability during traffic spikes and adverse scenarios such as DDoS attacks, which grew by 50% in the first half of 2020[3]. These are challenges that conventional architectures are not designed to handle efficiently.
After evaluating leading global technology providers focused on innovation and service performance, NZN chose the Azion Platform, which offers more than 30 points of presence in Brazil and the capabilities required for the country’s largest vertical content creator to keep evolving.
Solution
As a leader in creating targeted digital audiences in Brazil, NZN manages dozens of domains accessed by one in five internet users in the country. Ensuring consistent performance and high availability across its applications is critical to delivering rich media experiences to millions of users.
At the same time, DNS-based threats such as DDoS attacks, DNS poisoning, and hijacking continue to grow in frequency and sophistication. Any DNS outage could disrupt NZN’s services and impact both its partners and millions of users.
To address these challenges, NZN’s infrastructure team decided to adopt a globally distributed architecture capable of improving performance, resilience, and security for its applications and domains.
Results and Impact
In the first week of its partnership with Azion, NZN created a deployment plan to launch more than 100 Applications in just one month. Since then, the company has continued to expand, with approximately 200 applications currently running on the Azion Platform.
Azion’s serverless distributed computing model simplified infrastructure management and enabled NZN to handle more than 90% of requests directly on the edge, significantly reducing infrastructure costs.
Beyond cost optimization, distributing workloads across Azion’s infrastructure improved user experience, including a 50% reduction in content loading time across NZN’s websites.
From an availability and security perspective, the first major milestone was the successful mitigation of DDoS attacks during NZN’s first Black Friday event, ensuring uninterrupted service. Each website is now protected by its own Firewall policies, defending against threats such as SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and other application-layer attacks.
Additionally, the migration to the Azion Platform was completed without disruption and without affecting search engine rankings, where NZN’s websites maintain strong visibility across technology, news, and entertainment topics.
About NZN
In Brazil, one in five internet users consumes content from NZN, the largest vertical content creator in the country and owner of some of the most recognized digital brands, including TecMundo, The BRIEF, MegaCurioso, Minha Série, Baixaki, and Click Jogos.
Founded more than 20 years ago in Curitiba, NZN gained prominence early with the launch of Baixaki, which today reaches more than 5.4 million unique users. Today, NZN’s portfolio of digital platforms reaches more than 23 million monthly users.