In our Welcome to CIO Week 2023 post, we talked about wanting to start the year by celebrating the work Chief Information Officers do to keep their organizations safe and productive.
Over the past week, you learned about announcements addressing all facets of your technology stack – including new services, betas, strategic partnerships, third party integrations, and more. This recap blog summarizes each announcement and labels what capability is generally available (GA), in beta, or on our roadmap.
We delivered on critical capabilities requested by our customers – such as even more comprehensive phishing protection and deeper integrations with the Microsoft ecosystem. Looking ahead, we also described our roadmap for emerging technology categories like Digital Experience Monitoring and our vision to make it exceedingly simple to route traffic from any source to any destination through Cloudflare’s network.
Everything we launched is designed to help CIOs accelerate their pursuit of digital transformation. In this blog, we organized our announcement summaries based on the three feelings we want CIOs to have when they consider partnering with Cloudflare:
CIOs now have a simpler roadmap to Zero Trust and SASE: We announced new capabilities and tighter integrations that make it easier for organizations to adopt Zero Trust security best practices and move towards aspirational architectures like Secure Access Service Edge (SASE).
CIOs have access to the right technology and channel partners: We announced integrations and programming to help organizations access the right expertise to modernize IT and security at their own pace with the technologies they already use.
CIOs can streamline a multi-cloud strategy with ease: We announced new ways to connect, secure, and accelerate traffic across diverse cloud environments.
Thank you for following CIO Week, Cloudflare’s first of many Innovation Weeks in 2023. It can be hard to keep up with our pace of innovation sometimes, but we hope that reading this blog and registering for our recap webinar will help!
If you want to speak with us about how to modernize your IT and security and make life easier for your organization’s CIO, fill out the form here.
Simplifying your journey to Zero Trust and SASE
Securing accessThese blog posts are focused on making it faster, easier, and safer to connect any user to any application with the granular controls and comprehensive visibility needed to achieve Zero Trust.
| Blog | Summary |
|---|---|
| Beta: Introducing Digital Experience Monitoring | Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring will be an all-in-one dashboard that helps CIOs understand how critical applications and Internet services are performing across their entire corporate network. Sign up for beta access. |
| Beta: Weave your own global, private, virtual Zero Trust network on Cloudflare with WARP-to-WARP | With a single click, any device running Cloudflare’s device client, WARP, in your organization can reach any other device running WARP over a private network. Sign up for beta access. |
| GA: New ways to troubleshoot Cloudflare Access 'blocked' messages | Investigate ‘allow’ or ‘block’ decisions based on how a connection was made with the same level of ease that you can troubleshoot user identity within Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform. |
| Beta: One-click data security for your internal and SaaS applications | Secure sensitive data by running application sessions in an isolated browser and control how users interact with sensitive data – now with just one click. Sign up for beta access. |
| GA: Announcing SCIM support for Cloudflare Access & Gateway | Cloudflare’s ZTNA (Access) and SWG (Gateway) services now support the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol, making it easier for administrators to manage identity records across systems. |
| GA: Cloudflare Zero Trust: The Most Exciting Ping Release Since 1983 | Cloudflare Zero Trust administrators can use familiar debugging tools that use the ICMP protocol (like Ping, Traceroute, and MTR) to test connectivity to private network destinations. |
Threat defenseThese blog posts are focused on helping organizations filter, inspect, and isolate traffic to protect users from phishing, ransomware, and other Internet threats.
| Blog | Summary |
|---|---|
| GA: Email Link Isolation: your safety net for the latest phishing attacks | Email Link Isolation is your safety net for the suspicious links that end up in inboxes and that users may click. This added protection turns Cloudflare Area 1 into the most comprehensive email security solution when it comes to protecting against phishing attacks. |
| GA: Bring your own certificates to Cloudflare Gateway | Administrators can use their own custom certificates to apply HTTP, DNS, CASB, DLP, RBI and other filtering policies. |
| GA: Announcing Custom DLP profiles | Cloudflare’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) service now offers the ability to create custom detections, so that organizations can inspect traffic for their most sensitive data. |
| GA: Cloudflare Zero Trust for Managed Service Providers | Learn how the U.S. Federal Government and other large Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are using Cloudflare’s Tenant API to apply security policies like DNS filtering across the organizations they manage. |
Secure SaaS environmentsThese blog posts are focused on maintaining consistent security and visibility across SaaS application environments, in particular to protect leaks of sensitive data.
| Blog | Summary |
|---|---|
| Roadmap: How Cloudflare CASB and DLP work together to protect your data | Cloudflare Zero Trust will introduce capabilities between our CASB and DLP services that will enable administrators to peer into the files stored in their SaaS applications and identify sensitive data inside them. |
| Roadmap: How Cloudflare Area 1 and DLP work together to protect data in email | Cloudflare is combining capabilities from Area 1 Email Security and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to provide complete data protection for corporate email. |
| GA: Cloudflare CASB: Scan Salesforce and Box for security issues | Cloudflare CASB now integrates with Salesforce and Box, enabling IT and security teams to scan these SaaS environments for security risks. |
Accelerating and securing connectivityIn addition to product capabilities, blog posts in this section highlight speed and other strategic benefits that organizations realize with Cloudflare.
| Blog | Summary |
|---|---|
| Why do CIOs choose Cloudflare One? | As part of CIO Week, we spoke with the leaders of some of our largest customers to better understand why they selected Cloudflare One. Learn six thematic reasons why. |
| Cloudflare is faster than Zscaler | Cloudflare is 38-55% faster at delivering Zero Trust experiences than Zscaler, as validated by third party testing. |
| GA: Network detection and settings profiles for the Cloudflare One agent | Cloudflare's device client (WARP) can now securely detect pre-configured locations and route traffic based on the needs of the organization for that location. |
Making Cloudflare easier to useThese blog posts highlight innovations across the Cloudflare portfolio, and outside the Zero Trust and SASE categories, to help organizations secure and accelerate traffic with ease.
| Blog | Summary |
|---|---|
| Preview any Cloudflare product today | Enterprise customers can now start previewing non-contracted services with a single click in the dashboard. |
| GA: Improved access controls: API access can now be selectively disabled | Cloudflare is making it easier for account owners to view and manage the access their users have on an account by allowing them to restrict API access to the account. |
| GA: Zone Versioning is now generally available | Zone Versioning allows customers to safely manage zone configuration by versioning changes and choosing how and when to deploy those changes to defined environments of traffic. |
| Roadmap: Cloudflare Application Services for private networks: do more with the tools you already love | Cloudflare is unlocking operational efficiencies by working on integrations between our Application Services to protect Internet-facing websites and our Cloudflare One platform to protect corporate networks. |
Collaborating with the right partners
In addition to new programming for our channel partners, these blog posts describe deeper technical integrations that help organizations work more efficiently with the IT and security tools they already use.
| Blog | Summary |
|---|---|
| GA: Expanding our Microsoft collaboration: Proactive and automated Zero Trust security for customers | Cloudflare announced four new integrations between Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Cloudflare Zero Trust that reduce risk proactively. These integrated offerings increase automation, allowing security teams to focus on threats versus implementation and maintenance. |
| Beta: API-based email scanning | Now, Microsoft Office 365 customers can deploy Area 1 cloud email security via Microsoft Graph API. This feature enables O365 customers to quickly deploy the Area 1 product via API, with onboarding through the Microsoft Marketplace coming in the near future. |
| GA: China Express: Cloudflare partners to boost performance in China for corporate networks | China Express is a suite of offerings designed to simplify connectivity and improve performance for users in China and developed in partnership with China Mobile International and China Broadband Communications. |
| Beta: Announcing the Authorized Partner Service Delivery Track for Cloudflare One | Cloudflare announced the limited availability of a new specialization track for our channel and implementation partners, designed to help develop their expertise in delivering Cloudflare One services. |
Streamlining your multi-cloud strategy
These blog posts highlight innovations that make it easier for organizations to simply ‘plug into’ Cloudflare’s network and send traffic from any source to any destination.
| Blog | Summary |
|---|---|
| Beta: Announcing the Magic WAN Connector: the easiest on-ramp to your next generation network | Cloudflare is making it even easier to get connected with the Magic WAN Connector: a lightweight software package you can install in any physical or cloud network to automatically connect, steer, and shape any IP traffic. Sign up for early access. |
| GA: Cloud CNI privately connects your clouds to Cloudflare | Customers using Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Amazon Web Services can now open direct connections from their private cloud instances into Cloudflare. |
| Cloudflare protection for all your cardinal directions | This blog post recaps how definitions of corporate network traffic have shifted and how Cloudflare One provides protection for all traffic flows, regardless of source or destination. |