Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong

Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong strengthens resilience and performance with Cloudflare

Hutchison Telecommunications (Hong Kong) Limited (HTHK) operates in one of the world’s most demanding digital environments. As a leading digital operator, it must deliver fast, reliable digital experiences across brands like 3 Hong Kong, 3SUPREME and SoSIM, serving millions of customers.

With growing expectations for 5G, AI-enabled services, and always-on digital access, even brief disruptions can impact customer trust, revenue, and brand perception. To stay ahead, HTHK set out to modernise its approach to security and performance — without adding operational complexity.

The challenge: Keeping digital services always on while reducing complexity and cost

HTHK’s previous architecture relied on a mix of on-premise security appliances and multiple CDN vendors. While functional, this setup was increasingly hard to manage and expensive to maintain.

As traffic volumes and security threats continued to evolve, ensuring consistent service availability became increasingly important. Operational complexity from managing multiple vendors, together with rising egress bandwidth costs, placed additional strain on infrastructure operations.

The company needed a simpler, more resilient model that could scale with digital growth — and keep critical services online.

Consolidating security and performance into a single global layer

To address these challenges, HTHK consolidated application security and performance services onto a single, globally distributed platform. Cloudflare was deployed as a unified layer in front of critical digital endpoints and origin infrastructure, enabling modernisation without disrupting live services. The migration was completed with zero downtime, keeping customer-facing experiences continuously available throughout the transition.

Application security capabilities, including Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, Cloudflare API Shield, Advanced Rate Limiting, and Cloudflare Bot Management, were brought together under one control plane. This eliminated the need to manage overlapping tools and policies across vendors while delivering consistent protection across web applications, APIs, and mobile services.

API Shield also helped uncover and secure previously unmanaged “shadow APIs” that had accumulated as digital services expanded. With greater visibility into API traffic and standardised protections in place, HTHK reduced exposure across mobile apps, partner integrations, and internal services without slowing development or adding operational friction.

Stopping attacks while accelerating digital experiences

With security and performance operating together at the network edge, HTHK strengthened defenses while improving customer experience. Large-scale DDoS attacks that once threatened availability were mitigated automatically, resulting in near-zero unplanned downtime from these events.

With Cloudflare Bot Management, HTHK reduced malicious bot traffic to a negligible level — ensuring that users could access login portals and pricing pages without interference.

Performance gains followed: page load times dropped by a significant margin in key regions, and a substantial portion of static content was offloaded from origin servers, significantly reducing egress costs.

Because security inspection and performance optimisation happen in a single pass across the same global network, these gains didn’t come with trade-offs. Stronger protection didn’t introduce latency — it helped eliminate it.

Reducing operational overhead and increasing resilience

Consolidation also simplified operations and strengthened resilience. A unified platform reduced reliance on vendor-specific expertise and manual configuration. Teams gained centralised visibility into traffic, threats, and performance — accelerating response and reducing risk.

Changes could be rolled out gradually and safely, minimising deployment risk and increasing confidence in updates. The result is a more resilient digital foundation — one that scales with demand and allows teams to spend less time firefighting and more time focused on strategic initiatives.

What’s next: Preparing for compliance and future growth

Looking ahead, HTHK is building on this foundation to meet new regulatory and operational demands. The company is preparing for compliance with critical infrastructure and cybersecurity requirements while expanding security coverage across legacy environments.

As digital services continue to grow, HTHK plans to deepen API security and bot protection, as well as explore AI-driven threat detection to further strengthen resilience and visibility across its platforms.