Alex Kim: Why I joined Cloudflare

I am excited to announce that as of November 1, I have joined Cloudflare as Country Manager of South Korea to help build a better Internet and to expand Cloudflare’s growing customer, partner, and local teams in Korea. We just opened a new entity (after making Seoul our 23rd data center, more than 10 years ago)  and I am the first official employee of Cloudflare Korea LLC in Seoul, which is truly a great moment and privilege for me.

I was born in Korea and was educated in Korea until middle school, then I decided to move to Toronto, Canada to study film making to become a movie director. I finished high school and obtained a university degree in Toronto, during which I had the opportunity to be exposed to various cultures, as well as learn and become well-versed in the English language. I think it was a great time to learn how diverse people in the world are. My dream of becoming a movie director has changed over time for many reasons, but I think it is no coincidence that I have a job where I have to produce results while collaborating and orchestrating with many people, much like a movie director.

In my career of about 18 years, I have had various experiences, including pre-sales, support, consultant, and field sales, starting with Java programmer. The lesson from this variety of experiences is that if you work with a sense of ownership all the time, you can be the best in the field, and you can get the best compliments from your customers.

I've worked in a small company where the whole company has been agile, and I've worked in large companies like SAP, Dell, Autodesk, and Akamai, working with many teams. New technology and the best technology are important, but I also learned that the most important thing is the environment where people can work together and have fun, because people make the results after all.

Besides work, I love music. I didn't become a movie director, which was my childhood dream, but I relieve my stress by playing the piano and composing songs. In the past, I made a rock song for one of the companies I worked for, and when an opportunity presented itself,  we had a program where all the employees jumped in and sang my composition together. Unfortunately, I have not had enough time to make a lot of songs now, but if I have a chance, I would love to make a Cloudflare song and hope I can sing it together with my new colleagues.

Korea has one of the highest smartphone and Internet penetration rates in the world. Korea is also one of the countries with the fastest Internet speeds in the world. On the other hand, the pace of cloud transformation, that is making such a big difference to so many companies, is still lagging behind. The reason is that there are many government regulations on public enterprises and finance industries. Fortunately, as the government has recently moved to ease many regulations, the pace of cloud transformation is expected to accelerate in the future.

As cloud transitions accelerate, enterprises need to pay attention to security, and few companies will be able to deploy security as easily and securely in a cloud environment as Cloudflare.

Korea is a country where the economy grows only when it exports a lot. Many startups and chaebol (conglomerate) companies often grow future-oriented industries such as metaverse in Korea first and then expand their business abroad. For customers leading this global industry, Cloudflare will act like a safe highway in an Internet environment. I've come to Cloudflare to be part of this meaningful work.

In addition, Cloudflare Korea has just been launched. Even though we’ve had a presence here through our data center for the last 10 years, there are still many companies that we still need to build relationships with. I want to spread the value of Cloudflare to the Korean market quickly and become a Supercloud evangelist. I would also like to help Korean customers — organizations and businesses across multiple industries — achieve great success and ensure they have the right technology and Internet infrastructure. In the next few years, I will work hard to establish Cloudflare as the most trusted cloud security company in Korea, as well as contribute to expanding the business and creating jobs in the country.

As the first Country Manager of Cloudflare Korea, I am very excited  to work for a company with unlimited growth potential. As the global economy slows down, customers will gravitate towards products and solutions that are more valuable and price competitive. I'm looking forward to meeting and working with more customers that will benefit from all that Cloudflare has to offer.

One of the biggest reasons I chose Cloudflare is that Cloudflare has big dreams and visions. In particular, I think the emergence of R2 will provide an extremely cost-effective solution to enterprises' egress cost concerns, especially in economically challenging times.

In addition, Cloudflare is investing heavily to become the number one Zero Trust player. The VPN market is huge, and it has a lot of challenges (including user experience, speed, and security), and Zero Trust is still in its infancy but already showing its true potential. Cloudflare, which understands and invests in these huge markets, knows where to go in the marketplace.

Finally, the Supercloud is also an area that only Cloudflare can realize. Cloud security and Zero Trust are indispensable areas of the future, and I am very happy to join this futuristic company.