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Welcome to Cloudflare One Week

2022-06-19

4 min read
This post is also available in 简体中文, Español and 日本語.
Welcome to Cloudflare One Week

If we'd told you three years ago that a majority of your employees would no longer be in the office, you simply would not have believed it. We would not have believed it, either. The office has been a cornerstone of work in the modern era — almost an unshakeable assumption.

That assumption carried over into the way we built out IT systems, too. They were almost all predicated on us working from a consistent place.

And yet, here we are. Trends that had started out as a trickle — employees out of the office, remote work, BYOD — were transformed into a tsunami, almost overnight. Employees are anywhere, using any mobile or desktop device available to work, including personal devices. Applications exist across data centers, public clouds and SaaS hosting providers. Tasks increasingly are completed in a browser. All of this increases load on corporate networks.

While how we work has changed, the corporate networks and security models to enable this work have struggled to keep pace. They still often rely on a corporate perimeter that allows lateral network movement once a user or device is present on the network. VPNs remain a choke point in this model, tunneling their user traffic back into corporate perimeter where people rarely work; and MPLS lines and other private networking tools are still being used to extend an organization’s perimeter to… other offices, where people also rarely work.

And it’s not just that all these are expensive to set up: VPNs, MPLS lines and other perimeter solutions come with performance loss, create maintenance burden, and lack modern security tooling. Attackers know how to exploit their weaknesses. Many well known attacks over the last few years can be traced to unauthorized network access and subsequent lateral movement.

These problems are well known. Surprisingly, the answer to those challenges is also widely agreed upon at this point: shift to a Zero Trust Architecture. So what’s stopping people? As we’ve spoken to folks, it’s one thing, more than anything else: how? How do we do this? Underlying this is worry — that yes, while there are plenty of the risks and problems associated with the old world, they’d rather tackle the devil they know than the one that they don’t — the worry and change and cost associated with the lifting and shifting to Zero Trust.

This, more than anything else, is what we want to change with Cloudflare One Week.

Zero Trust doesn’t need to be hard. It can be stage-gated. You prove the benefits of the new model to your organization, while allowing it to transition at a pace it can handle. In short: Zero Trust can let your organization do more, let your organization do it better, and all this can come with cost savings.

Welcome to Cloudflare One Week.

The shifting goalposts of Zero Trust, SASE, SSE

While there is broad recognition of the limits of the perimeter model, one thing that keeps coming up in customer conversations about Zero Trust is: how do all these replacement concepts relate to one another? Which one should I be pursuing?

A big part of our efforts this week is to make the goal of a Zero Trust architecture approachable and understandable. All these terms get thrown around, sometimes interchangeably. We’ve spent the time understanding and building out the products to get a comprehensive Zero Trust solution.

But we don’t want you to just trust us.

We believe in Zero Trust Architecture so strongly that we worked with security experts to build a vendor-agnostic guide to implementing Zero Trust. Even if a business does not use Cloudflare, we believe that Zero Trust and SASE are the future for all businesses, regardless of which vendor they use. Here is a complete guide to navigating the world of Zero Trust.

Separately, we’ve also mapped all our products in this space to the concepts above — making it easy to follow along during the week to see how all the pieces fit together.

No one else delivers comprehensive security

Cloudflare was not the first in the application services space. We weren’t the first in the content delivery space; nor were we first in the web security space. But there’s a reason that analyst after analyst now recognize us as leaders there.

It is because our rate of innovation is simply unmatched.

We were not first to the Zero Trust space, either. But in the span of a few short years, in Cloudflare One, we have now built the most feature complete SASE offering on the market.

Cloudflare One’s Zero Trust offering includes Zero Trust Network Access, Secure Web Gateway, CASB, Data Loss Prevention, Remote Browser Isolation, Firewall as a Service, and Email Security. Every security control is configured through a single dashboard and can be deployed as code using our API or Terraform.

No one else does all of this. And over the course of this week, we’ll prove it to you.

And no one else can do it without slowing you down

Cloudflare One was built on top of Cloudflare’s existing global network. We spent over a decade building this network to support our global CDN and application security business. The network spans 270+ cities, 100 countries and is within 50ms of 95% of the Internet connected global population. From day one, we built our network to deploy additional technology on the same network, including Cloudflare One. This allows us to provide one of the most performant, reliable and interconnected Service Edges in the market.

The scale and scope of our network has other advantages when it comes to deploying a SASE solution, too. We make it easy to connect to Cloudflare Service Edge through a comprehensive set of on-ramps. These on-ramps allow users, devices, data centers, offices to connect to Cloudflare anywhere in the world. The on-ramps range from full scale SD-WAN to a lightweight client on user devices.

We plan on proving that we are the most performant Zero Trust provider over the course of this week, too.

Welcome to Cloudflare One Week - we’re just getting started

If you’ve been thinking about Zero Trust or SASE, Cloudflare One Week will demonstrate why Cloudflare One is one of the most complete SASE offerings in the market, with some of the best performance, and why it will only continue to improve. Over the week we will announce new features, show comparisons of competitors, and show you how easy it is to get started.

Cloudflare's connectivity cloud protects entire corporate networks, helps customers build Internet-scale applications efficiently, accelerates any website or Internet application, wards off DDoS attacks, keeps hackers at bay, and can help you on your journey to Zero Trust.

Visit 1.1.1.1 from any device to get started with our free app that makes your Internet faster and safer.

To learn more about our mission to help build a better Internet, start here. If you're looking for a new career direction, check out our open positions.
Cloudflare One WeekProduct NewsCloudflare Zero Trust

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Kenny Johnson|@KennyJohnsonATX
Cloudflare|@cloudflare

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