Case Study: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory achieves Zero Trust security and blocks 2M+ monthly threats with Cloudflare

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Customer Case Study

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a DOE national lab managed by the University of California with roughly 5,000 staff and visiting researchers, faced the challenge of securing a highly decentralized web infrastructure while keeping research resources widely accessible. The lab struggled with limited visibility into cloud-hosted web servers, frequent defacements and probes, and heavy reliance on VPNs and resource‑intensive scanning that couldn’t keep pace with a constantly changing environment.

Berkeley Lab deployed Cloudflare’s suite—WAF, CDN, Load Balancing, Access, Rate Limiting, and Super Bot Fight Mode—to regain visibility, terminate TLS at the edge, enable Zero Trust access with MFA, and stop automated attacks and DDoS. The result: the WAF blocks over 2 million threats monthly, the CDN serves about 2 TB of cached traffic per month, on‑prem hardware was reduced via load balancing, and the lab has been able to phase users off the VPN while improving security and compliance.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory