Taiwan's National medical institutions

Taiwan's National medical institutions raise their defenses with unified security and Cloudflare-powered protection

A consortium of Taiwan’s national medical institutions; spanning hospitals, research facilities, and public health centers, faced a growing storm of cyber threats driven by geopolitical tensions. With legacy defenses fragmented across regions and increasingly sophisticated DDoS attacks targeting critical health infrastructure, IT leaders needed a coordinated and scalable approach to security that could meet public-sector requirements while delivering consistent protection across the board.

Working with Twister5 — a full-service application security firm and authorized Cloudflare reseller based in Taiwan — the institutions successfully modernized their security posture, unified fragmented defenses, and ensured strict compliance with government regulations on data routing and sovereignty. Twister5 specializes in cloud-native and hybrid security solutions for regulated industries, with deep expertise in implementing scalable, high-assurance architectures.

Securing national healthcare services under sustained threat

Taiwan’s public sector is no stranger to targeted cyberattacks. Medical institutions in particular, responsible for protecting sensitive health records and ensuring service continuity, are frequent targets for DDoS campaigns. Over the past several years, these institutions experienced waves of service disruptions caused by volumetric attacks overwhelming their on-premise defenses.

The stakes were high. With healthcare delivery and emergency response systems on the line, uninterrupted availability wasn’t just a technical goal, it was a public safety imperative. Strengthening DDoS resilience became a top priority, along with broader efforts to consolidate security policies and bring consistency to a historically decentralized architecture.

Another key challenge stemmed from regulatory restrictions that prevent any data traffic from transiting infrastructure in China, Hong Kong, or Macau. These rules, aimed at protecting sensitive public-sector information, limited the range of acceptable service providers and ruled out common global traffic patterns.

Complicating matters further, each regional institution had designed its own security program in isolation, resulting in uneven levels of protection, incompatible configurations, and no clear path to standardization.

Modern edge protection with global reach and local control

To address the DDoS challenge, the institutions chose Cloudflare’s anycast-based architecture, which routes traffic through over 330 full-featured edge locations worldwide. This distributed design allows attacks to be absorbed and filtered close to the source before they can saturate core infrastructure or reach origin servers.

Crucially, Cloudflare’s customizable routing controls enabled the institutions to enforce strict geographic exclusions, ensuring that no data passed through nodes in China, Hong Kong, or Macau. This met public-sector compliance requirements without sacrificing performance or availability.

The centralized visibility and single-policy model made it easier for the institutions to apply consistent security postures, monitor threat activity in real time, and scale up protections across all branches simultaneously.

In-person consultation drives unified deployment

While the technical solution was clear, deployment across such a diverse set of institutions required precision, coordination, and on-the-ground insight. Twister5 played a critical role in this transformation, deploying expert consultants to visit each regional site across Taiwan.

These specialists worked directly with IT teams to assess local environments, align configurations with the new centralized architecture, and smooth over inconsistencies. In many cases, this involved adapting to legacy infrastructure, varying network equipment, and differing levels of technical readiness. Twister5 also conducted hands-on training, helping institutional staff understand how to manage, monitor, and maintain their Cloudflare deployments within the new framework.

This white-glove approach turned what could have been a disruptive migration into a cohesive rollout, strengthening not only the institutions’ defenses, but their long-term operational confidence.

Beyond web: securing non-HTTP traffic with Cloudflare Spectrum

Several institutions depended on applications and services running on non-standard ports outside the common HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443) ranges. Traditional solutions often struggled with these use cases, requiring complex network reconfiguration or specialized appliances.

Cloudflare Spectrum provided a clean, scalable solution. By extending Cloudflare’s DDoS protection and performance optimization to any TCP/UDP service, the institutions could secure legacy systems and critical internal tools without re-architecting their environments. Intelligent routing, near-user edge delivery, and connection-level visibility improved both resilience and performance, especially for latency-sensitive applications.

A security strategy that delivered — and earned trust

Following deployment, the institutions saw a significant reduction in the impact of DDoS events, improved visibility across all sites, and stronger internal alignment around security operations. The ability to comply with strict traffic routing rules, without sacrificing performance, was especially valuable.

Impressed by the results and the depth of support provided, the institutions renewed their Cloudflare-based service contracts for the following year, affirming their trust in both the platform and Twister5’s strategic guidance.