When you are the Chief Information Officer (CIO), your systems need to just work. A quiet day when users go about their job without interruption is a celebration. When they do notice, something has probably fallen apart.

We understand. CIOs own some of an organization's most mission-critical challenges. Your security counterparts expect safety to be robust while your users want it to be unintrusive. Your sales team continues to open offices in new locations while those new hires need rapid connectivity to your applications. You own a budget that never seems to grow fast enough to match price increases from point solution vendors. On top of that, CIOs must support their organizations' shifts to new remote and hybrid work models, which means modernizing applications and infrastructure faster than ever before.

Today marks the start of CIO Week, our celebration of the work that you and your teams accomplish every day. We’ve assembled this week to showcase features, stories, and tools that you can use to continue to deliver on your mission while also improving the experience of your users and administrators. We’ve even included announcements to help on the budget front.

We’re doing this because we’ve been in the same places. Our own security team could not compromise on tools to safeguard Cloudflare while we grew beyond the walls of a couple of locations. We hired new staff members around the globe to manage one of the world’s largest networks, and they needed access to be fast. We were also predominantly a work-from-office organization. Today, we're hiring for in-office, remote and hybrid opportunities all over the world.

We believe CIOs are shaping the future of the modern organization. From securely connecting employees and third-parties to critical applications, to safeguarding sensitive company data from phishing and other malicious threats, CIOs are effectively tasked with protecting an organization’s crown jewels. This week we’ll demonstrate how Cloudflare is helping CIOs to accelerate digital transformation and maximize employee collaboration and productivity – all while strengthening security. Welcome to CIO Week.

CIOs own, sponsor, or support an organization's digital transformation strategy that touches all parts of a business. These cross-functional efforts can include moving applications and data to the cloud, building new competencies in areas like data analytics or automation, and developing new digital products and services to drive growth.

While these initiatives are largely driven by the motivation to go faster, CIOs recognize that speed cannot come at the expense of safety. Balancing both goals, however, can quickly become complicated. Layering on new technologies can add overhead and increase total cost of ownership. Administrators can struggle if products require different management interfaces and control planes or work differently in different locations. Plus, poor integrations and interoperability can mean precious time is wasted just getting services to work together.

We think about hidden challenges like these often when building new products at Cloudflare. As Cloudflare’s CIO, who you’ll hear from shortly, likes to phrase it, we’re helping CIOs by “bringing the glue”. That is, when building anything new, we ask ourselves to focus on delivering benefits that could not be obtained using individual products in silos. Throughout this innovation week, you’ll see announcements highlighting how organizations can realize more value when services work natively together.

Designing our security products to be composable and easy to use helps our customers speed up their digital strategy.  But we think about speed in other ways too. First, we optimize our services to enforce protections for any request, from anywhere around the globe, so that security doesn’t get in the way of end users. (In fact, we’re so proud of this that we even dedicated an entire innovation week to delivering speedy user experiences across the Internet). Second, we pride ourselves on being speedy in innovation, delivering new capabilities and services at such high velocity that we not only solve the problems you’re facing today, but also help you proactively plan for fixing your problems of tomorrow.

For many organizations, an increasingly critical goal of digital transformation is revamping networking and security. As applications, users, and data have shifted outside the walls of the corporate perimeter, the traditional tools of the castle-and-moat model no longer make sense.

Instead, modernized architectures like SASE (or Secure Access Service Edge) are gaining traction, advocating to unify all networking and security controls to a single control plane in the cloud. On that journey, we’re seeing organizations turning to Zero Trust for best practices and principles to enable the broader visibility and granular controls needed to steer the modern workforce.

While concepts like SASE and Zero Trust still need the occasional explainer, the benefits are real, and CIOs are turning to our SASE platform – Cloudflare One – to start realizing those business benefits. When customers start their SASE and Zero Trust journeys with Cloudflare, they are connecting their employees to our global network to inspect and apply controls to as much traffic and data as they want. Whether your traffic is traversing from on-premise to the cloud, from one cloud to another, or something in between, Cloudflare has a way to secure and accelerate traffic.

This week, we will be announcing even more capabilities and products that make the single-vendor SASE dream a reality.

Before taking on any long-term digital transformation challenge, it’s vital to make sure you're surrounded by the right people and partners to go the distance.

With our broad mission to help build a better Internet, it means that we must do the same at Cloudflare. We partner with fellow industry leaders to help CIOs with efforts like the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project to quickly improve the cyber readiness of vulnerable infrastructure or our partnership with Yubico to provide security keys at “Good for the Internet” pricing (for as low as $10 per key!).

This collaborative ethos extends far beyond just these types of focused initiatives. Over recent years, Cloudflare has invested in our ecosystem of alliances, channel partners (including system integrators and advisory / consulting firms), and technology partners to make sure customers have options to pursue digital transformation in the way that makes the most sense for them. In particular, we have seen more customers and partners collaborating on long term SASE and Zero Trust use cases with our Cloudflare One platform.

Over the course of this week, we’ll share more about strategic partnerships, including opportunities to enable a Zero Trust strategy using Cloudflare One platform services and deeper integrations with key partners like Microsoft.

The expertise of partners combined with Cloudflare’s network scale and simplicity helps CIOs modernize security at their own pace.

When CIOs think about a multi-cloud strategy it tends to center around applications. Multi-cloud strategies devise careful plans for migrating applications, ensuring that efficiency, scale and speed of delivery goals are met in the cloud.

But often overlooked are the highways of connectivity that are essential for a speedy connection from one cloud to another or from an on-premise data center to another network in a cloud provider. While speeding up applications is the focus, having a global endpoint and identity-neutral network fabric for consistency and composability is equally important.

This week, we’ll highlight how Cloudflare is able to connect you to/from anything. Whether a request is coming to or from other cloud providers, IoT devices, or in challenging regions or areas, Cloudflare provides a global control plane to help your business stay secure and keep things moving fast.

We believe that Cloudflare is the neutral supercloud control plane. Over the course of this week, we’ll show you how our platform is built to work seamlessly with multiple cloud providers, allowing organizations to easily and securely manage their cloud infrastructure.

New project kickoff, budget planning update, security compliance report, hiring review board, hybrid tooling workshop and the list goes on.

All this and it’s only Monday morning. Sound familiar?

My job as  Cloudflare’s CIO shares most of the challenges that any other CIO post faces in these uncertain times. Today business technology leaders have to balance managing short term budget pressure, while at the same time having to keep strategic areas properly funded to not mortgage the company’s future. On the other hand one of the perks of being Cloudflare’s CIO is being a direct participant in the incredible rate of innovation we hold ourselves to at Cloudflare, and in return, the benefit we can deliver to our customers.

I can’t wait for us to share all the exciting announcements and new product features this week. Why? Well, my team has been using a lot of them from even the early versions.

One of the awesome things about getting to be CIO here is being Customer Zero for most of Cloudflare’s products, getting to try everything first, and play Product Manager from time to time… Before we ask you to trust us with your networks, security, or data, we’ve put ourselves through the test first. Securing Cloudflare using Cloudflare, or “Dog Fooding” as we call it internally, is something ingrained in our culture.

But don’t just take it from me, during the week you’ll hear from other fellow CIOs who view Cloudflare as a trusted partner. My hope is at the end of the week, you’ll consider having Cloudflare as a trusted partner too.

Welcome to CIO Week!

Our Business Continuity Team is monitoring the situation closely and all company personnel are kept up to date via multiple internal communication channels including a live chat room. Customers and the public are encouraged to visit this blog post for the latest information.

You can check the status of our network at www.cloudflarestatus.com. For COVID-19-related questions that aren’t answered below, please contact our Customer Support Team.

Yes, Cloudflare’s Business Continuity Team is a cross-functional, geographically diverse group dedicated to navigating through a health crisis like COVID-19 as well as a variety of other scenarios that may impact employee safety and business continuity.

In addition to Cloudflare’s existing Disaster Recovery Plan we have implemented the following strategies:

• Daily Business Continuity Team meetings to determine if updates, changes, or communication need to be provided to customers, partners, and employees.

• Global monitoring of COVID-19 related events and impact.

• Tailored business continuity plans per office and function, including work from home policies and regional resources.

Fortunately the nature of Cloudflare business is digital and rarely requires in-person activity. At this time we do not anticipate significant impact to products or services. Some teams are adjusting to teleworking but at this time we have not identified a service-level impact.

Troubleshooting and maintenance of the platform is performed by Cloudflare employees in globally dispersed locations. On-prem support is not required for the vast majority of our products and services.

Products can be used without the need for manual interaction from Cloudflare employees.

Cloudflare does not have call centers. Our support personnel will continue to provide assistance 24 hours a day to customers no matter their location as usual.

Yes, Cloudflare has implemented travel restrictions to countries as recommended by government agencies. Employees are encouraged to postpone all non-essential business travel at this time including inter-office travel. We are monitoring regional guidance from health authorities and updating our requirements as needed.

Cloudflare has taken an extra step to work with critical business partners and suppliers to ensure that there will be minimal to no impact to the business or our customers.

Cloudflare offices in the US, EMEA, Sydney, and Singapore are physically closed and we have moved to a full teleworking model.

In Beijing, employees have been split into two groups. Each group will be alternating between working from home and working in the office.

Cloudflare’s business continuity team has worked with organization leaders to prepare for the challenges of COVID-19 and many other scenarios. We are confident in our ability to limit impact to services because of our preparation.

At this time we do not anticipate any service disruptions due to COVID-19. We are monitoring the situation closely and will update as information becomes available.

Due to the nature of the Anycast network, we have over 200 Points of Presence (PoPs) that manage failover traffic. Traffic would simply be rerouted to other locations. Learn about the Anycast network here: https://www.cloudflare.com/network/.

The Infrastructure and Engineering teams are working proactively to ensure that enough capacity is available at our most critical PoPs. We feel confident in our ability to service our most critical facilities with our approved partner.

Our Customer Support Team is fully operational and will reach out as they would with any other outage or incident. Methods vary based on contract.

You can check the status of our services at www.cloudflarestatus.com. Additionally, our Customer Support Team is fully operational and will reach out as they would with any other outage or incident. Methods vary based on contract.

For questions not answered above, customers can reach out to our Customer Support Team via normal means.

I am delighted to share that I have joined Cloudflare as its first Chief Information Officer to help scale the company in this new phase of its business. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be joining Cloudflare, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do my part to help build a better Internet.

At one of my previous companies, I made a bet on Cloudflare to equip us with security and performance solutions across a very decentralized global set of products and services. This is something that would have been very difficult without a cloud solution like Cloudflare’s. Since then I’ve been watching Cloudflare grow, and have always been very impressed by the speed of innovation and transparency, but also how Cloudflare operates: doing the right thing, with integrity, and above all building trust with customers and partners. The “do the right thing, even if it’s hard” mentality that I saw from Cloudflare since I started doing business with them as a customer, was key for me. When I heard that Cloudflare was looking for its first CIO I was excited to have a discussion to see if I could help.

During the interview process I got a sense of how the values that are so important to me from a culture point of view were coming across consistently from everybody that I met with. Every person I spoke with was extremely committed to helping build a better Internet; it wasn’t just a tagline. The true mission and ability to impact so many people globally was something that was super motivational for me. Also, growing the company, but doing it the right way with empathy and bringing people along. I couldn't have worked for a company where building that trust through values and integrity wasn't something that was front and center. Building a diverse team was another focus. I kept hearing this over and over again, which is something that I am very passionate about and committed to as well.

It is a very exciting time to join the team. Cloudflare just went public, and the requirements of a public company are significantly higher from a compliance point of view. Cloudflare’s culture is engineering and product driven, and all about speed of innovation and delivering value to our customers; being able to maintain that culture and output, while at the same time keeping up with new legal requirements as a public company drives significant needs in terms of systems, end-to-end processes, integration, and efficiency in general. This, in a company like Cloudflare that is growing the way it is, was a significant challenge that drew me in. At the same time, the ability to be a part of an organization working hand-in-hand with product engineering made this even more appealing, as my background is in software leading teams in both the engineering and IT departments.

I am incredibly excited for this opportunity to embark on this journey with everyone on the team and to help build a better Internet. Helping to solve incredibly interesting and complex problems that Cloudflare navigates on the intersection of technology, security, privacy, legal frameworks, and on (the landscape will always be developing) is an incredible opportunity.

Solving problems globally—it’s just amazing to be able to be a part of something like that!