I am excited to announce that I joined Cloudflare last month as Head of Australia & New Zealand, to continue to build on Cloudflare’s success in the region through extending our valuable relationships with our customers and partners.

I’ve been fortunate over my 25-year career in the IT industry to have worked for some of the most recognised and innovative organisations such as Oracle, Salesforce, and Zendesk. It’s been exciting to be inside these businesses as they’ve taken new ideas about how software can be developed and delivered to solve real world problems for any organisation’s customers. I’ve learned a lot by being a part of the industry, but probably more importantly, I’ve learned the most from the smart, experienced, diverse groups of talented people that I’ve had the pleasure to work with in ANZ and across Asia Pacific. I have always been interested in the problems that organisations are trying to solve through technology — for example, responding to strategic challenges, reducing cost, improving revenue, reducing risk — and joining Cloudflare is an opportunity to stay focussed on addressing those critical issues with our customers and partners using Cloudflare’s innovative solutions.

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. So the question I asked myself is, “why is that so important?” In truth, the Internet has become such an integral part of our everyday lives that we take it for granted and forget that we are using it today in ways for which it was not originally designed or architected. It doesn’t have the security, performance, or reliability that is required to ensure the integrity that the modern world expects. Legacy solutions to solve these problems aren’t scalable or cost-effective. This became especially true once the cloud happened.

The solution has been a massive shift at the network layer as “as-a-service” delivery architecture evolves. Cloudflare is leading this transition through its extensive global network, providing security and enhancing the performance of business critical applications, while at the same time eliminating the cost and complexity of managing network hardware within a global cloud platform.

On this basis I’m convinced that Cloudflare, with its distributed network, continued focus on innovation, as well as our commitment to helping our customers, is in the best position to respond to the challenges being presented.

I live in Melbourne and enjoy all the wonderful things that the city has to offer, from beautiful parks for some exercise, to its vibrant restaurant and bar scene, to the exciting array of major and global sporting events such as the AFL, Australian Open Tennis and Formula One Grand Prix. I love spending time with family and friends.

I’m looking forward to working with our customers and partners on their projects to deliver genuine business value. I believe that Cloudflare’s products and solutions will make a real difference to the way organisations in every part of ANZ’s economy can successfully respond to today’s security challenges.

As home to over 200 million Internet users and the fourth-largest population in the world, Indonesians depend on fast and reliable Internet, but this has always been a challenging part of the world for Internet infrastructure. This has real world implications on performance and reliability (IP transit is on average 6x more expensive than our major South East Asian interconnection markets). That said, first we wanted to share what makes things challenging in Indonesia; geography, infrastructure, and market dynamics.

Geography: The Internet backbone for many countries is almost entirely delivered by terrestrial fiber optic cables, where connectivity is more affordable and easier to build when the land mass is contiguous and there is a concentrated population distribution. However, Indonesia is a collection of over 18,000 islands, spanning three time zones, and approximately 3,200 miles (5,100 km) east to west. By comparison, the United States is 2,800 miles (4,500 km) east to west. While parts of Indonesia are geographically close to Singapore (the regional Internet hub with over 60% of the region's data centers) given how large Indonesia is, much of it is far away.

Infrastructure: Indonesia is a large country and to connect it to the rest of the Internet it currently relies on submarine fiber optic cables. There are a total of 22 separate submarine cables connecting Indonesia to Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and onward. Many of the cable systems cross the Strait of Malacca, a narrow stretch of water, between the Malay Peninsula (Peninsular Malaysia) and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the southwest, connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This makes reliability challenging as a result of human activities, such as ships dropping their anchors, fishing trawlers, and dredging as it is one of the world's top five busiest shipping lanes. Additionally, Indonesia is geographically located in a very active seismic zone and is very earthquake prone.

There are a number of new submarine cable systems that have come online and four significant builds planned (Apricot, ACC-1, Echo and Nui) that will improve both available capacity and cost economics in the market. Right now the cost is still significantly higher than comparable distances. For example Jakarta to Singapore is approximately 60 times more expensive than a service the same distance would be in the continental US or Europe for a 100Gbps wavelength service. Staying in Asia, a similar distance from Hong Kong to Taiwan costs around 1/6th that of Jakarta to Singapore.

Cyber 1 and Cyber 3 (NTT NexCenter) Data Center Buildings in Jakarta, 2019 (Photo Credit: Tom Paseka).

Picture of Cyber 1 Lobby Directory

While areas like Batam are becoming increasingly popular for data center builds due to its proximity to Singapore, Jakarta is still the most developed and mature market. It has the largest and best interconnected data centers in the country, including the two pictured.

Cloudflare is deployed in the facility on the right (NTT NexCenter), however most ISPs are inside the building on the left (Cyber 1). The two buildings are approximately 30-50 meters apart, yet it's surprisingly difficult to be able to connect between them. One of the reasons why is market fragmentation and how many options are available. In the adjacent picture of the Cyber 1 building lobby directory many of the listings are unique data centers each with different policies and access conditions.

In the past, we’ve talked about the Cost of Bandwidth around the world (and updated here), but we’ve never talked about Indonesia specifically. Using the same methodology as we’ve used in the past, Indonesia's cost is 43x times more expensive than North America or Europe, or even multiples more expensive than other countries in Asia.

Market dynamics: While Indonesia has good and functioning Internet Exchanges, there are a few ISPs who dominate the market. The three largest ISPs in the country (Telkom Indonesia, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and XL Axiata) collectively control 80% of the market, while Telkom Indonesia alone has a market share of around 60% by revenue.

This results in Telkom Indonesia having a heavily dominant market share position to leverage resulting in refusal to peer, or exchange Internet traffic in Indonesia without expensive payments, or instead, preferring to connect to other networks outside of Indonesia, introducing latency and diminished performance.

Despite all of these challenges, our network has come a long way since our initial deployment to Jakarta in 2019.

We’ve established:

• A carrier neutral local point of presence at NTT Indonesia Nexcenter Data Center, one of the major interconnection hubs in Jakarta

• An edge partnership point of presence in Yogyakarta with CitranetIX

• Direct interconnections in country with two of the top three networks.

• Peering across three of the larger local internet exchanges, Indonesia Internet Exchange, Jakarta Internet Exchange and Biznet Internet Exchange

• Dedicated 100G wavelength transport back to Singapore

All of this results in a more performant and reliable network for our local customers.

We wanted to see how our network is performing since deployment. We mentioned during Speed Week in 2021 how we benchmark against different networks, and sharing some of those benchmarks here.

At the end of December 2021, Cloudflare was only faster in a few networks, as compared to other providers in Indonesia.

Fast forward twelve months to December 2022, Cloudflare is significantly faster in even more networks.

The TCP protocol is a connection-oriented protocol, which means that a connection is established and maintained until the application programs at each end have finished exchanging messages. The Connect Time summarizes how fast a session can be set up between a client and a server over a network. TTLB (or time to last byte) is the time taken to send the entire response to the web browser. It’s a good measure of how long a complete download takes. Check out our recent blog on Benchmarking Edge Network Performance for more information on how we measure the performance of our network and benchmark ourselves against industry players.

On closer inspection against the three major ISPs specifically, we’re the top provider for two out of the three networks. Cloudflare’s performance has improved year-on-year (16% reduction) and continues to lead (comparative to the other networks) meaning faster and more responsive services for our customers.

Helping build a better Internet for Indonesia doesn’t stop here and there is always more work to be done! We want to be the number one network everywhere and won’t rest until we are. We are continuing to connect to more networks locally, invest in direct submarine cable capacity, as well as further deployments into new data center buildings, Internet Exchanges and new cities too!

Are you operating a network and not yet peering with Cloudflare? Log-in to our Peering Portal or find out more information here for ways to set up peering, or request we deploy nodes into your network directly.

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.

We announced the Data Localization Suite in 2020, when requirements for data localization were already important in the European Union. Since then, we’ve witnessed a growing trend toward localization globally. We are thrilled to expand our coverage to these countries in Asia Pacific, allowing more customers to use Cloudflare by giving them precise control over which parts of the Cloudflare network are able to perform advanced functions like WAF or Bot Management that require inspecting traffic.

In 2020, we introduced (Regional Services), a new way for customers to use Cloudflare. With Regional Services, customers can limit which data centers actually decrypt and inspect traffic. This helps because certain customers are affected by regulations on where they are allowed to service traffic. Others have agreements with their customers as part of contracts specifying exactly where traffic is allowed to be decrypted and inspected.

As one German bank told us: "We can look at the rules and regulations and debate them all we want. As long as you promise me that no machine outside the European Union will see a decrypted bank account number belonging to one of my customers, we're happy to use Cloudflare in any capacity".

Under normal operation, Cloudflare uses its entire network to perform all functions. This is what most customers want: leverage all of Cloudflare’s data centers so that you always service traffic to eyeballs as quickly as possible. Increasingly, we are seeing customers that wish to strictly limit which data centers service their traffic. With Regional Services, customers can use Cloudflare's network but limit which data centers perform the actual decryption. Products that require decryption, such as WAF, Bot Management and Workers will only be applied within those data centers.

You might be asking yourself: how does that even work? Doesn't Cloudflare operate an anycast network? Cloudflare was built from the bottom up to leverage anycast, a routing protocol. All of Cloudflare's data centers advertise the same IP addresses through Border Gateway Protocol. Whichever data center is closest to you from a network point of view is the one that you'll hit.

This is great for two reasons. The first is that the closer the data center to you, the faster the reply. The second great benefit is that this comes in very handy when dealing with large DDoS attacks. Volumetric DDoS attacks throw a lot of bogus traffic at you, which overwhelms network capacity. Cloudflare's anycast network is great at taking on these attacks because they get distributed across the entire network.

Anycast doesn't respect regional borders, it doesn't even know about them. Which is why out of the box, Cloudflare can't guarantee that traffic inside a country will also be serviced there. Although typically you’ll hit a data center inside your country, it’s very possible that your Internet Service Provider will send traffic to a network that might route it to a different country.

Regional Services solves that: when turned on, each data center becomes aware of which region it is operating in. If a user from a country hits a data center that doesn't match the region that the customer has selected, we simply forward the raw TCP stream in encrypted form. Once it reaches a data center inside the right region, we decrypt and apply all Layer 7 products. This covers products such as CDN, WAF, Bot Management and Workers.

Let's take an example. A user is in Kerala, India and their Internet Service Provider has determined that the fastest path to one of our data centers is to Colombo, Sri Lanka. In this example, a customer may have selected India as the sole region within which traffic should be serviced. The Colombo data center sees that this traffic is meant for the India region. It does not decrypt, but instead forwards it to the closest data center inside India. There, we decrypt and products such as WAF and Workers are applied as if the traffic had hit the data center directly.

Historically, we’ve seen most interest in Regional Services in geographic regions such as the European Union and the Americas. Over the past few years, however, we are seeing a lot of interest from Asia Pacific. Based on customer feedback and analysis on regulations we quickly concluded there were three key regions we needed to support: India, Japan and Australia. We’re proud to say that all three are now generally available for use today.

But we’re not done yet! We realize there are many more customers that require localization to their particular region. We’re looking to add many more in the near future and are working hard to make it easier to support more of them. If you have a region in mind, we’d love to hear it!

India, Japan and Australia are all live today! If you’re interested in using the Data Localization Suite, contact your account team!

Having fast Internet properties means being as few milliseconds as possible away from our customers and their users, no matter where they are on Earth. And because of the design of Cloudflare's network we don't just make Internet properties faster by being closer, we bring our Zero Trust services closer too. So whether you're connecting to a public API, a website, a SaaS application, or your company's internal applications, we're close by.

This is possible by adding new cities, partners, capacity, and cables. And we have seen over and over again how making the Internet faster in a region also can have a clear impact on traffic: if the experience is quicker, people usually do more online.

Cloudflare’s network keeps increasing, and its global footprint does so accordingly. In April 2022 we announced that the Cloudflare network now spans 275 cities and the number keeps growing.

In this blog post we highlight the deployment of our data center in Hagatna, Guam.

Guam is about 2,400 km from both Tokyo in the north and Manila in the west, and about 6,100 km from Honolulu in the east. Honolulu itself is the most remote major city in the US and one of the most remote in the world, the closest major city from it being San Francisco, California at 3,700 km. From here one can derive how far Guam is from the US to the west and from Asia to the east.

Figure 1: Guam Geographical Location.

Why is this relevant? As explained here, latency is the time it takes for data to pass from one point on a network to another. And one of the main reasons behind network latency is the distance between client devices — like a browser on a mobile phone — making requests and the servers responding to those requests. So, if we consider where Guam is geographically, we get a good picture about how Guam’s residents can be affected by the long distances their Internet requests, and responses, have to travel.

This is why every time Cloudflare adds a new location, we help make the Internet a bit faster. The reason is that every new location brings Cloudflare’s services closer to the users. As part of Cloudflare’s mission, the Guam deployment is a perfect example of how we are going from being the most global network on Earth to the most local one as well.

There are 486 active submarine cables and 1,306 landings that are currently active or under construction, running to an estimated 1.3 million km around the globe.

A closer look at specific submarine cables landing in Guam show us that the region is actually well served in terms of submarine cables, with several connections to the mainland such as Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Australia, Indonesia and Hawaii, therefore making Guam more resilient to matters such as the one that affected Tonga in January 2022 due to the impact of a volcanic eruption on submarine cables - we wrote about it here.

Figure 2: Submarine Cables Landing in Guam (source: submarinecablemap.com)

The picture above also shows the relevance of Guam for other even more remote locations, such as the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) or the Marshall Islands, which have an ‘extra-hop’ to cover when trying to reach the rest of the Internet. Palau also relies on Guam but, from a resilience point of view, has alternatives to locations such as the Philippines or to Australia.

Cloudflare’s presence in Guam is through Mariana Islands Internet Exchange, or MARIIX, allowing Cloudflare to peer with participants such as:

• AS 395400 - University of Guam

• AS 9246 - GTA Teleguam

• AS 3605 - DoCoMo Pacific

• AS 7131 - IT&E

• AS 17456 - PDS

As there are multiple participants, these are being added gradually. The first was AS 7131,  being served from April 2022, and the latest addition is AS 9246, from July 2022.

As some of these ASNs or ASs (autonomous systems — large networks or group of networks) have their own downstream customers, further ASs can leverage Cloudflare’s deployment at Guam, examples being AS 17893 - Palau National Communications Corp - or AS 21996 - Guam Cell.

Therefore, the Cloudflare deployment brings not only a better (and generally faster) Internet to Guam’s residents, but also to residents in nearby archipelagos that are anchored on Guam. In May 2022, according to UN’s forecasts, the covered resident population in the main areas in the region stands around 171k in Guam, 105k in FSM and 60k in the Marshall Islands.

For this deployment, Cloudflare worked with the skilled MARIIX personnel for the physical installations, provisioning and services turn-up. Despite the geographical distance and time zone differences (Hagatna is 9 hours ahead of GMT but only two hours ahead of the Cloudflare office in Singapore, so the time difference wasn’t a big challenge), all the logistics involved and communications went smoothly. A recent blog posted by APNIC, where we can see some personnel with whom Cloudflare worked, reiterates the valuable work being done locally and the increasing importance of Guam in the region.

Before Cloudflare’s deployment in Guam, customers of local ASs trying to reach Internet properties via Cloudflare’s network were redirected mainly to Cloudflare’s deployments in Tokyo and Seattle. This is due to the anycast routing used by Cloudflare — as described here; anycast typically routes incoming traffic to the nearest data center. In the case of Guam, and as previously described, these large distances to the nearest locations represents a distance of thousands of kilometers or, in other words, high latency thus affecting user experience badly.

With Cloudflare’s deployment in Guam, Guam’s and nearby archipelagos’ residents are no longer redirected to those faraway locations, instead they are served locally by the new Cloudflare servers. Although a decrease of a few milliseconds may not seem a lot, it actually represents a significant boost in user experience as latency is dramatically reduced. As the total distance between users and servers is reduced, load time is reduced as well. And as users very often quit waiting for a site to load when the load time is high, the opposite occurs as well, i.e., users are more willing to stay within a site if loading times are good. This improvement represents both a better user experience and higher use of the Internet.

In the case of Guam, we use AS 9246 as an example as it was previously served by Seattle but since around 23h00 UTC 14/July/2022 is served by Guam, as illustrated below:

Figure 3: Requests per Colo for AS 9246 Before vs After Cloudflare Deployment at Guam.

The following chart displays the median and the 90th percentile of the eyeball TCP RTT for AS 9246 immediately before and after AS 9246 users started to use the Guam deployment:

Figure 4: Eyeball TCP RTT for AS 9246 Before vs After Cloudflare Deployment at Guam.

From the chart above we can derive that the overall reduction for the eyeball TCP RTT immediately before and after Guam’s deployment was:

• Median decreased from 136.3ms to 9.3ms, a 93.2% reduction;

• P90 decreased from 188.7ms to 97.0ms, a 48.5% reduction.

When comparing the [12h00 ; 13h00] UTC period of the 14/July/2022 (therefore, AS 9246 still served by Seattle) vs the same hour but for the 15th/July/2022 (thus AS9246 already served by Guam), the differences are also clear. We pick this period as this is a busy hour period locally since local time equals UTC plus 10 hours:

Figure 5 - Median Eyeball TCP RTT for AS 9246 from Seattle vs Guam.

The median eyeball TCP RTT decreased from 146ms to 12ms, i.e., a massive 91.8% reduction and perhaps, due to already mentioned geographical specificities, one of Cloudflare's deployments representing a larger reduction in latency for the local end users.

We can actually see an increase in HTTP requests in Guam since early April, right when we were setting up our Guam data center. The impact of the deployment was more clear after mid-April, with a further step up in mid-June. Comparing March 8 with July 17, there was an 11.5% increase in requests, as illustrated below:

Figure 6: Trend in HTTP Requests per Second in Guam.

If you’re an ISP that is interested in hosting a Cloudflare cache to improve performance and reduce backhaul, get in touch on our Edge Partnership Program page. And if you’re a software, data, or network engineer – or just the type of person who is curious and wants to help make the Internet better – consider joining our team.

“You can accomplish anything if you do it. Nothing will be accomplished unless you do it. If nothing is not accomplished, that’s because no one did it.“— Yozan Uesugi

Long hours and hard work. If you ask anyone in Japan what our work culture is like, chances are, these are the words that will come to mind. Different countries have their own cultures and also specific work habits and ways of having a work-life balance. The pandemic brought everyone (companies and their people) a new reality, new lessons, and new habits. Here at Cloudflare, our thinking around where and how we do our best work has evolved over the course of the pandemic. We care about addressing the diverse needs of our workforce and our policies and benefits are designed to optimize for their flexibility and needs. To that end, Cloudflare Japan is making a few important changes to our employee benefits:

• “take what you need” time off for all our employees

• 16-week gender-neutral paid parental leave

• flexible working hours

First, let’s try to understand a bit of the Japanese work culture. According to Japan’s labor laws, Japanese employed workers are assumed to work a maximum of 8 hours a day, or 40 hours per week. But ask any employed person in Japan and you will soon discover that people work much longer hours than that. A 2015 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that about 22% of Japanese employees work 50 hours or more each week on average, well above 11% in the U.S., and 6% in Spain. On top of that, people are also less likely to take personal time off. While existing labor laws provide every employed person with at least 10 days of annual leave (+1 day for every year of service, usually capped at 20 days), a 2017 General Survey on Working Conditions published by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare found that on average, people only actually took 8.8 days of annual leave per year.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and things started to change. With restrictions put in place, a lot of us had no choice but to work from home, a concept that’s completely foreign to the Japanese work culture. And now two years into the pandemic, there has been a shift in the Japanese way of working. In a recent Zero Trust survey that Cloudflare conducted in Japan, 74% of IT and cybersecurity decision makers said their organization will be implementing a combination of return-to-office and work-from-home. This means that the future of work in Japan is flexible.

While we encourage our teams to always get their work across the finish line, we also appreciate the value and importance of having personal time to be able to spend with loved ones, take up a hobby, or simply for rest and relaxation. We believe that time away from work helps you be better at work. Our time away from work policies are designed for that and reflect the reality that technology has enabled us to be more mobile and flexible in the 21st century.

On parental leave, we strongly believe that parents should have equal opportunity to bond with their new family member, and don’t believe in forcing a parent to designate themselves as a “primary” or “secondary” caregiver. We believe these designations create a false dichotomy that does not reflect the modern family, nor reflect our values of diversity and equality; especially when we know that these designations typically disadvantage the careers of women more than men in the workplace.

Lastly, we remain committed to providing great physical spaces for our employees to work, collaborate, and celebrate in, while they’re in the office. While remote work is currently still the norm, it will be up to teams and individuals to decide what works best for them for the task at hand. People may wish to come into our offices to meet with their colleagues, socialize, or join on-site workshops, but then choose to do their quiet focus time work from home. As such, we just completely redesigned and renovated our offices in San Francisco and London —  starting with these offices with experimentation in-mind and with the purpose of reimagining our other global offices. Our way of working has changed, and as such our spaces should support this shift, to be a place where teams can come together and collaborate most effectively.

Cloudflare has had a longstanding presence in Japan, expanding our network into Tokyo in 2010, just months after launching. Today, we have seven points of presence across four cities, and we also announced our Tokyo office in 2020.

Also, it’s important to mention that in Q4 2021, Cloudflare blocked an average of 1.9 billion attacks per day in Japan. That number has grown to 3.8 billion attacks per day blocked by Cloudflare in Q1 2022, an increase of 100% since the previous quarter.

My goal when I joined Cloudflare almost six months ago remains the same — to help customers in Japan accelerate their digital transformation, that will in turn help improve Japan’s competitiveness in the world. In order to do this, we need to continue to provide a great work environment and build a great team. And we’re just getting started!

We are actively recruiting in Japan and have many open roles across different functions. If you’d like to join us in our mission to help build a better Internet, come talk to us!

I joined Cloudflare in March to lead Partnerships & Alliances for Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC). In the last month I’ve been asked many times: “Why Cloudflare?” I’ll be honest, I’ve had opportunities to join other technology companies, but no other organization excited me more than Cloudflare. So I jumped. And I couldn’t be more thrilled for the opportunity to build a strong partner ecosystem for APJC.

When I considered joining Cloudflare, I recall consistently reading the message around “Helping to Build a Better Internet”. At first those words didn’t connect with me, but they sounded like an important mission.

I did my research and read analyst reports to learn about Cloudflare's market position, and then it dawned on me, Cloudflare is leading a transformation. Taking traditional on-premise networking and security hardware and building a transformational cloud-based solution, so customers don’t need to worry about which company supplied their kit. I was excited to learn that Cloudflare customers can simply access the vast global network that has been designed to make everything that customers connect to on the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable. So hasn’t this been done before? For compute and storage that transformation is almost a commodity now, but for networking and security, Cloudflare is leading that transformation and I want to be part of that.

As I continued to learn more about Cloudflare, I connected with the mission of Project Galileo, Cloudflare's response to cyber attacks launched against important, yet vulnerable groups such as social activists, humanitarian organizations, minority groups and the voices of political dissent, who are repeatedly flooded with malicious cyber attacks in an attempt to take them offline. I was inspired that Cloudflare was part of something beyond a technology transformation. Vulnerable groups and communities who are part of Project Galileo, have access to Cloudflare security services at no cost.

So now that I’m on the inside I shouldn’t be surprised that I continue to find reasons why Cloudflare is the place to work for. Female leadership is well represented, including our President, COO, and co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn, who took the time to meet me during the interview process, and Jen Taylor our Chief Product Officer, whom I met while she was in Sydney meeting customers and partners, gave me a warm welcome.

In my third week in the company, I met a new colleague at a team gathering. We immediately hit it off chatting and getting to know each other. She had built a career in the sports industry which was ripped from under her during the pandemic, where she was one of the many who lost their jobs. What inspired me about her story was how Cloudflare embraced this as an opportunity to bring diverse talent into the company. They opened their virtual arms and doors to offer her an opportunity to build a career. Cloudflare crafted a path that led her into a Business Development role and now into an Associate Solutions Engineer role. Who does that? Cloudflare does, and I’m working with inspiring leaders who are committed to making that happen.

Finally, early in my career I learned the importance of working with Partners. It is important to commit to joint goals, build trust, celebrate success and carry each other through the trenches when things get tough. As a freshly anointed Cloudflare employee, my top priority is to build a strong culture of partnering. Partners are an important extension of our team and through Partners we can provide customers with deeper engagement and expert knowledge on Cloudflare products and services. My initial priority will be to focus on building Zero Trust Partner Practices supporting a significant number of APJC businesses who are planning a Zero Trust strategy, driven by an increase in cyber attacks. This year, we are rolling out sales and technical enablement, in addition to marketing funding to accelerate the ramp up of our Zero Trust partners.

In addition, the team will lean into partnerships who offer professional services and consulting practices that can support customer implementations. Our partners are critical to our joint success, and together we can support customers in their journey through network and security transformation. Finally, I’m excited to share that our co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn will be in Sydney in September for Cloudflare Connect. I look forward to leveraging that platform to share more detail on the APJC Partnerships strategy and launching the APJC Partner Advisory Board.

I’m excited to announce that I recently joined Cloudflare in Japan as Vice-President and Managing Director, to help build and expand our customer, partner base, and presence in Japan. Cloudflare expanded its network in Japan in 2010, just months after launching. Now, 12 years later, Cloudflare is continuing its mission to help build a better Internet in Japan and across the globe, and I’m looking forward to being able to contribute to that mission!

In my 35-year career in the IT industry, I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the biggest technology companies in the world, working in various roles in both sales and technical sides of the business. I consider this one of my biggest strengths. In addition, working in the IT industry has allowed me to acquire industry knowledge across a number of different solutions such as custom development, packaged systems (ERP, CRM), MS Office products, and cloud solutions.

Most recently, I was director of the Enterprise Business Group for Japan at AWS, where I was responsible for all commercial industries such as Manufacturing, Process, Distribution, Retail, Telecommunications, Utility, Media, Service, Pharmaceuticals, among others. Prior to AWS, I was Microsoft's Managing Executive Officer in charge of the Public Sector. In this role, I managed business and strategic relationships with the central government and local government, as well as the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and education industries to help customers accelerate their digital transformation, especially when it comes to their shift to the cloud. In 2005, I joined SAP Japan and spent eight years establishing the partner ecosystem, managing about 250 partners. My last role in SAP was to drive business as a sales leader for three industries (public, utility, and telecommunication). In 1999, I joined IBM to be an initial member of the ERP business unit. At IBM, I got the opportunity to manage large ERP implementations as a Senior Project Manager.

If I look back on my career, I experienced so many things from many dimensions. I started my career as an engineer after I graduated from university. It was the first time I learned what a computer was. I enjoyed my first job as a programmer. I remember how it was a great time for me to learn new things every day since technology was rapidly changing, even in the old days, many, many years ago. I am proud that I have always kept the engineering spirit even after I moved to a sales and management position. After two years as a programmer, I moved to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and spent 12 years as a Systems Engineer. At that time, DEC decided to establish a new manufacturing facility in Japan to provide better quality for Japanese customers. My mission was to design, develop, and maintain all the application systems required to ensure a smooth and seamless manufacturing process, including master production schedule, manufacturing resource planning, inventory, purchasing, work order, shop floor control, and finally developed an automated warehousing system. My last job in DEC was to implement SAP R/3 as a Japan implementation manager. The Japan implementation team was part of the global SAP implementation project, giving me the opportunity to work in a multinational environment. I really enjoyed working at DEC. It was a truly excellent experience for me.

As I look back on my career, one of the things I consider my strength is that throughout those years I got to experience working on technology and computers — as a customer, as a partner, and as a salesperson. Now 35 years later, I'm finally convinced that my role in a global IT company is to contribute to the digital transformation of our customers as well as the society as a whole in Japan, by being able to share global best practices. I decided to join Cloudflare to help accelerate the digital transformation that will help improve Japan’s competitiveness in the world. I believe we have a lot of opportunities to help companies in Japan in this transformation. I remember the feeling I had when I started my first-ever job. I felt a thrill and great motivation. I have the same feeling now with this excellent opportunity for me to launch my new journey with Cloudflare.

It's often been said that Japan has been slow to adopt digital models, compared to the United States, Europe, and even some countries in Asia. In order to accelerate this digital transformation, the Japanese Government launched a new policy called “Cloud By Default” and subsequently established a Digital Agency in September 2021. There is so much to do, and we are behind. The shift to the cloud has just begun. Businesses are starting to move from on-premise to the cloud, and many organizations are selecting a multi-cloud environment as the next generation platform. Cloudflare has the right solutions, the right people and the right strategy to help Japanese organizations make that shift.

Cloudflare is in a unique position to transform the way we do business by providing security, enhancing the performance of business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual hardware, all within a global cloud platform. Cloudflare’s vast global network, which is one of the fastest on the planet, is trusted by millions of web properties. With direct connections to nearly every service and cloud provider, the Cloudflare network can reach 95% of the world’s population within 50 ms. Cloudflare already has 250 data centers including two Japan sites, Tokyo and Osaka.

Cloudflare is ready to help customers in Japan accelerate their digital transformation and be a trusted solution provider for the Japanese market. I am very much looking forward to contributing to the growth of the business, and the acceleration of the digital transformation for businesses in Japan.

I am excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as the Head of Southeast Asia and Korea (SEAK) region to help build a better Internet and to expand Cloudflare’s growing customer, partner and local teams across all the countries in SEAK. Cloudflare is at an emergence phase in this region, with immense growth potential, and this is just the beginning. Cloudflare has had a lot of success globally and our charter is to build on that success and momentum to grow our presence locally to address the demands in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Indochina and Korea. Customer engagements in each of the countries in SEAK presents a unique, rich and fulfilling engagement each with their own intricacies.

I was born in India (Surat, Gujarat), and at the age of four our family moved to Bahrain where we lived for eight years. We then moved to New Zealand, which is where I completed my senior years of high school and also my Bachelor’s Degree in Information Engineering at Massey University. After graduation, we moved to Melbourne, Australia which is our family home and where my career started.

I love meeting and working with diverse and interesting people who bring different views, thoughts and perspectives. The experiences growing up and working in so many countries has made me a more dynamic leader, while working with so many cultures and diverse teams. Diversity is what drives innovation and growth, more so true than ever in this exciting region.

I love my sports (cricket, squash, golf), traveling and spending time with family & friends.

I joined IBM Australia as a graduate in 1997, gaining valuable experiences across many roles from delivery to sales, in a career spanning 15 years. Having been in the IT industry for more than 27 years, career experiences at large global organisations like IBM, SAP, Cisco, NTT and Oracle, all of these amazing organisations and colleagues (many of whom are friends), have provided me with the best set of tools and experiences which I can bring to Cloudflare to help drive the growth agenda.

Below are the main reasons I joined Cloudflare to embark on this amazing journey:

1. Cloudflare’s Growth potential: Cloudflare has an immense growth potential in APJC and subsequently in Southeast Asia & Korea.  In our recently announced Q3 earnings, we reported a 51% year-over-year increase in revenue, with a record addition of 170 large customers.

2. Cloudflare’s ever-growing Portfolio: I was lucky enough to join during Birthday Week, Cloudflare’s 11th birthday. Many new products and solutions were announced during the week to further enhance our growing portfolio of solutions. I am amazed at the pace of innovation, where Cloudflare is continuously releasing new products and features on the Cloud that are then instantly available at all our data centers globally for our clients to consume and adopt.

3. Cloudflare People: During the interview process, I met with 11 Cloudflare colleagues, and all of these felt more like a discussion with a two-way dialogue and a view for Cloudflare to get to know me better, and for me to better understand Cloudflare. This emphasised in my mind the like-minded people I will be working with, where we all work collaboratively, leveraging the experiences we all bring from our past to achieve greater outcomes.

4. Cloudflare Culture: having now met with so many of my colleagues at Cloudflare, the one thing that stands out for me is the humility with which everyone operates from Global and Regional leaders to our local teams. The all-inclusive culture at Cloudflare along with the three tenets of Curious, Transparent and Principled are very much aligned with my personal principles: Honesty, Integrity and Transparency.

It is an exciting time to be joining one the fastest growing Cloud companies in the world and I want to be part of the Cloudflare journey and contribute to the growth agenda.

I am convinced that Cloudflare is and will be an even bigger global IT giant. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet, by working collaboratively with our customers to make them more secure, providing a high level of performance to support their business critical applications, while reducing cost and the complexity of managing their network infrastructure.

The Southeast Asia and Korea region is such a diverse, dynamic and exciting region to be in, where the potential for growth is limitless. As many as 40 million people in six countries across the region — Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand — came online for the first time in 2020. That pushed the total number of internet users in Southeast Asia to 400 million with some of the biggest ecommerce markets in the world.

Similarly, Korea has the highest internet penetration rate with 96% of its population online. On top of that, the government is investing heavily in its Digital New Deal program, which will focus on development of technologies based on data, networks and AI, as well as a digitization plan that will create job opportunities in a number of industries across the country.

Cloudflare is in a unique position to transform the way business is conducted in this region with its global cloud platform that delivers a broad range of network and security services to businesses of all sizes across all geographies. Coverage across Large Enterprises, Public Sector, Mid-Market, Start-ups to the individual developer: companies of all sizes across all industries are being powered by Cloudflare to provide Security, Performance, and Reliability services.

If you are interested in joining Cloudflare and helping to build a more secure, fast, and reliable Internet, do explore our open roles. We are hiring talented people locally, building and strengthening our local teams across: Strategic / Account Executives, Channel Managers, Business Development Representatives, Strategic / Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers and more.

It is a great honour and a privilege for me to be part of the Cloudflare family to help build Cloudflare’s future in Southeast Asia and Korea. The potential opportunity is enormous, and we are just getting started.

Feel free to reach out to me at satyen@cloudflare.com.

In the United States, May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. This year, we wanted to celebrate this occasion in a more inclusive and comprehensive way, which is why we called our celebration APAC Heritage Month. This initiative was a collaboration between Desiflare and Asianflare, Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for employees of Asian descent. We are proud to have run a diverse slate of events and content that we had planned throughout this month of celebration.

Our priority for APAC Heritage Month has been to share the stories and experiences of those in our community: we hosted several different segments to highlight the strong culture and heritage with moderated panels. We also took this opportunity to highlight some of the leaders in the industry of APAC descent around the world, to talk about their journey and struggles, so we can learn from each other and grow to be inspired. Although there has been progress in the past several years regarding representation of APAC stories being told, this small handful of narratives have a hard time representing two thirds of the world. By telling a more diverse set of APAC stories — our own, from immigrants, stories about food, culture and our careers — we hope to bring visibility to our experiences and our existence.

To keep everyone safe during the pandemic, all of our external events this year have been virtual and televised on Cloudflare TV:

• The Asian American Experience: a CFTV series on the collective experience of Asian Americans.

  • The Youth of Today: a moderated panel discussion of young Cloudflarians on the experience of both first and second generation young Asian Americans.

  • Culinary Experiences: an exploration of cuisine and it’s bidirectional influence with Asian American culture.

  • The Asian-American Experience: Past, Present, Future: Christine Hung, VP, Data and Engineering, Flatiron Health, will share the story of her career, and the path she took to be where she is today.

• Coming of Age: a guided exploration through large cultural concepts and concerns that folks of Asian heritage stay cognizant of as they go through life.

  • One Child Policy: an in-depth exploration of the PRC’s One Child Policy.

  • Model Minorities: a critical review of the contentious idea/myth.

  • Filial Piety and Familial Responsibility: an examination of intergenerational relations and how that’s changing.

• Founder Focus: a spotlight on the human stories behind startup founders.

  • Quinn Wang - Quinn Wang is the founder of Quadrant Eye, a convenient way to renew your eye prescription online and get your glasses or contact lens prescription emailed to you.

  • Angus Luk - Angus Luk is the founder of EventX, Asia's leading virtual events platform. We'll be discussing everything from pivoting during the pandemic, to the trade-off of in-person, virtual, or hybrid events in different places around the world.

  • Beyang Liu - Beyang Liu co-founded Sourcegraph, a web-based code search and navigation tool for dev teams.

  • Kathy Zhou - Kathy Zhou is founder and CTO of Queenly, the largest marketplace for formalwear, from prom, pageant, to all evening gowns.

  • Jeremy Lam - Jeremy Lam is founder and CEO of Venu, a YC startup focused on virtual trade shows, expo halls, and hybrid events. We'll be discussing everything from the economics of trade shows, the impact of the pandemic, and predictions for the future.

• Fireside Chats: a chat set to explore the different careers of Asians in influential positions and what their experiences are of getting there.

  • Christine Hung, VP, Data and Engineering, Flatiron Health.

  • Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, hardware hacker, author, researcher, mentor to hardware startups.

  • Oli Yu, Engineering Director at Cloudflare.

  • Mohit Bijlani, EMEA Sales Manager at Cloudflare.

  • Roy Lo, EMEA Sales Manager at Cloudflare.

  • Christine Starkman, researcher and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

  • Andy Nallappan, CTO and Head of Software Business Operations at Broadcom.

  • Andrew Li, Engineering Manager at Cloudflare.

• We Are Cloudflare: Interviews with the people behind the scenes that make Cloudflare what it is. Join Chaat as he interviews people from across all teams and offices. Get to know what they do and the kind of people we are.

• Cooking with Cloudflare: a live segment from our kitchens where we learn to make a dish or two from a Cloudflarian somewhere around the world.

• A Mile in Your Shoes: A story about their family's migration, their childhood pets, education and unique experiences, to better understand the lives of our colleagues.

Check out our APAC Heritage month landing page for the recordings of the events that occurred this month. We wanted to celebrate this month and truly embrace the culture and diversity, so please watch the recordings back on Cloudflare TV and beyond. Cloudflare embraces diversity and values diverse teams. We have also taken the recommendations of our teammates and put together a Playlist for you to be inspired by and deep dive into the deep rooted culture and practices we have celebrated this month.

In the spirit of highlighting APAC voices, we also wanted to take this opportunity to share a little about how our Asianflare and Desiflare Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) got started.

In March 2020, I (Jade) was having lunch with my colleague Stanley. We were venting to each other about the family of four who had been attacked in a grocery store parking lot in Texas. A few other co-workers joined the conversation, and we got to talk about how it echoed experiences of growing up as a minority in the US with Asian heritage.

That day turned out to be one of the last times we would physically be together in an office.

Stanley and I created Asianflare, the employee resource group for Asian heritage at Cloudflare, when we realized that we needed a space to serve as a support group. Surely, we weren’t the only ones who needed an emotional outlet about current events that impact our demographic. And we had a feeling that things were going to get worse before they got better. In the beginning, we just needed a safe space to just share our experiences with each other. And as lockdowns began across all the offices across the world, the Asianflare community became a real social hub as casual office chatter vanished into the ether.

The community blossomed with every food photo, every music or movie recommendation, every article discussion. We celebrated festivals together, held Zoom Lo Hei (“Prosperity Toss”) in multiple time zones, and held fireside chats on everything from career advice to public policy. Remember when WeChat and TikTok looked like they might be banned in the U.S.? We organized an internal fireside chat with Alissa Starzak, our public policy expert, to answer our questions on what to expect, especially those of us who feared getting cut off from our friends and family. On the average day, though, about 80% of our conversations are about food.

In March 2021, amidst the background radiation of escalating anti-Asian hate, a shooter killed eight people in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian women. What changed this time was the social support structures we had in place. We have a community that can grieve together, just as much as we celebrate together. Our People Team connected us with group therapy sessions offered by one of our benefits providers. At the BEER meeting our CEO, Matthew Prince, not only brought awareness to the issues and what our community was experiencing, but also offered our physical security team’s help. Even when I went outside, the flags were flying at half-mast. Colleagues I hadn’t heard from in ages reached out to make sure we were OK.

I know now that a kid like me growing up today would not see their families’ experiences swept under the rug, because our experiences are a part of the conversation now.

At the San Francisco office in 2019, we started to notice a sizable number of both folks of South Asian origin and folks with a deep interest in South Asian culture. So during Diwali (a festival of lights), we decided to have a small lunch get-together. The precursor to Desiflare was thus born in a room with 25 people congregating together for a commemorative vegetarian meal. The success of this small event led to monthly lunch meetings and eventually the formalization of the Desiflare ERG. Given the sizable Desi presence across all of our offices and the expansive interest we’ve seen in Desi culture across Cloudflare, today we see our ERG heavily represented around the world, especially in San Francisco, Austin, NYC, London, and Singapore!

Our Mission is to “Foster a sense of belonging and community amongst Cloudflare employees with an interest in the rich South Asian Culture as a platform to bring people together.”

We welcome everyone who identifies with or is otherwise interested in South Asian culture and look forward to welcoming all into our Desi community! While we are bound by the common fabric of South Asian, we realize that South Asia is vast and varied. Our shared body of culture embraces a breadth of diverse traditions, cuisines, habits, and beliefs, which is only magnified by the variation across the Desi diaspora across the world.

We therefore aspire to embrace and learn about each other to make the Desiflare ERG a place where all feel welcome!

I’m excited to announce that on March 1, I joined Cloudflare as Vice President and GM, Asia Pacific (including Japan and Greater China) to help build and expand Cloudflare’s growing customer and partner base and presence in the region. We currently have over 200 passionate and customer-focused employees in APAC, with offices in Beijing, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.

Singapore is where I’m based. Melbourne is home with my early years spent in Country Victoria. I love the outdoors, sports, travelling and spending time with family and friends. I am naturally intrigued by interesting people and different perspectives. I have a thirst for learning and understanding why people act and behave the way they do, and believe that understanding more about different cultures makes me a better person/leader. And what better way to do so than by being in the most diverse region in the world — Asia Pacific is home to 60% of the world’s population, with thousands of languages spoken, spanning multiple time zones. With the rise of innovation and technology adoption in the region, growth and expansion opportunities are endless.

Throughout my 20-year career, I have been extremely fortunate to work for companies that were instrumental in technological transformations, which have made a huge impact on the way we do business and everyday life. From IBM to Cisco to Amazon Web Services, these companies have pioneered innovations that transformed legacy systems, processes, and ways of working into intuitive platforms that enable scale, cost efficiencies, collaboration, and connectivity everywhere.

This brings me to Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. The Internet is the lifeblood of business and the primary vehicle of commerce and communication for people around the world. While it was brilliantly architected, it was not designed to deliver the security, performance, and reliability required for businesses today. For decades, a number of vendors built a range of standalone hardware boxes to address the emerging requirements for security, performance, and reliability. These boxes could be deployed in on-prem data centers to deliver functions and to alleviate some of the Internet’s fundamental security, performance, and reliability problems. And then, the cloud happened.

Organizations now exist in a complex infrastructure environment that highlights the Internet’s fundamental problems more than ever. The on-prem boxes that they once relied upon to solve these problems were never designed to work in such an environment. As a result, a major architectural shift at the network layer is now underway, and Cloudflare is leading this transition. Cloudflare is well-positioned to transform the way we do business by providing security, enhancing the performance of business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual network hardware, all within a global cloud platform.

Asia Pacific currently has the largest number of Internet users globally, with more than 53 percent of its population now online. What’s more, the coronavirus pandemic has only reinforced what was already an upward trend — e-commerce — with about 75 percent of global retail growth coming from the region. The rise in Internet traffic also means an increase in online threats that are becoming highly sophisticated, automated, and distributed. Unfortunately, cyber threats do not just impact retailers. All other industries, from manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, government, are not excluded. With business moving more and more to the cloud, organizations now require network and security capabilities that will allow them to be agile, nimble, and secure at any given time. This is where Cloudflare can help.

I’m really excited to work with our customers in APAC and talk about all of Cloudflare’s capabilities, because I truly believe that our products and solutions will make a huge impact in the region. As I begin this role, my priorities are around building a diverse and entrepreneurial team, generating brand visibility, and creating strategic customer relationships enabled by a vibrant partner ecosystem with a strong customer focus. I hope to build a team that is passionate about our customers and their success. We have a tremendous opportunity to create pockets of innovation with our customers, leveraging learnings, not only from our global counterparts but also from within the region. The best part? We’re just getting started!

It’s been one year since I joined Cloudflare as Head of Australia and New Zealand. While it has been a great year for our ANZ operations, it is hard to stop thinking about the elephant in the room, especially as I’m writing this blog from my home in the middle of Melbourne’s lockdown.

The pandemic has not only disrupted our daily lives, but has also caused a massive shift to remote work for many of us. As a result, security teams lost visibility into office network traffic, their employees moved to unsupervised WiFi networks with new video conferencing technology, and their IT teams found that their out-dated VPN platforms could not handle all the traffic of remote employees. While many organisations were already moving to cloud-based applications, this year has exacerbated the need for greater security posture. Our team has been even more humbled by our mission to help build a better Internet and help organisations face the increased security threats COVID-19 has triggered. With that in mind, I’d like to take a look back at the milestones of the past year.

First, I’d like to recognise how strong and resilient our people have been in the past year. It is not just about the pandemic. It is about a team that has grown more than 60% in size, and for some, have never had the opportunity to meet their colleagues face-to-face, but managed to keep our spirit and culture alive. I’m so proud of how the team continues to meet every customer challenge head on, answering urgent calls for help, many of whom needed to optimise and secure their systems for a remote workforce unprepared for 2020’s curveball.

This is an essential piece in helping to build a better Internet, and the mission is far from over. We recognise the Internet has become an essential service, and greater Internet usage has come with greater cyber risk, and COVID has put the spotlight on the security pain points that Australian organisations and citizens are facing. Scammers have stolen AU$1.2 million from Australians in the first six months of the year, and our recent report ranked Australia fifth in the world for the volume of DDoS attacks targeting Internet properties in Q2.

We need to continue building strong defences against these threats. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison unveiled Australia’s Cyber Security Strategy a few weeks ago, which I had the privilege to consult for. However, we need to go further than this and provide organisations with more than a loose plan for upgrading their security standards.

This is why our mission remains more important than ever, and we are ready to take more on. By the end of 2020 and through 2021, we plan to grow our team significantly to meet the challenges. In the meantime, I believe we need to keep that conversation alive, elevate the message to every board member, and every employee regarding the security risks Australian organisations are facing to really spark a change.

With that said, I am heartened by the increasing number of organisations, large and small, that we have been discussing or working with in the past 12 months. In total, we have had conversations on security with hundreds of organisations over the year, including dozens of meetings on my end with CIOs, CSOs and CISOs, with a very positive response regarding the urgent need for greater security. I have the feeling we are building some kind of community, all rallying behind that common goal.

A few specific examples stand out, as they are perfect illustrations of the variety of problems the team has been able to solve, but also of organisations currently looking for optimisation and security. They are incredibly different, but equally exciting.The first is Australian tech darling Canva, whose online graphic design tool is used by over 35 million people worldwide each month. Canva is the perfect example of a business we have helped scale, while maintaining performance and security for their team and design community. Today Canva uses a number of our solutions including Cloudflare Access to secure remote access to internal apps, Workers to customize how user traffic is handled at the network edge, and Bot Management to significantly reduce cyberattacks by image-scraping bots.

Just as Canva simplifies graphic design, Cloudflare simplifies performance and security. Thanks to Cloudflare, we can focus on growing our product and expanding into new markets with confidence, knowing that our platform is fast, reliable, and secure.” – Jim Tyrrell, Head of Infrastructure, Canva

The other one is the organisation Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, which is a participant of Cloudflare’s Project Galileo. At Cloudflare, we believe helping to build a better Internet comes with offering more equal access to cybersecurity solutions to vulnerable groups. In 2014, we launched Project Galileo to provide enterprise-level cybersecurity services at no charge to qualified public interest groups like artists, advocates, humanitarian organizations, and the voices of political dissent.

Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef’s purpose is essential: working to protect and conserve the Great Barrier Reef through in-water projects and public engagement. With a strong emphasis on digital innovation and open source data, the organisation relies on its website to engage and mobilise people around the world to join their mission. Through Project Galileo, we’ve helped them to secure their origin server from large bursts of traffic or malicious actors attempting to access the website.

"Under Project Galileo we're always online - a web-fronted not-for-profit running on the resources of a startup, but with the network confidence of an enterprise." – Som Meaden, Technologist at Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef

However, there is only so much we can do alone. Because we are stronger together, we continue to establish and reinforce strategic partnerships in the region. In June, we strengthened our relationship with Rackspace to provide our shared users with combined services aimed at securing and optimising their growing online presence. We have also partnered with Baidam and AC3. Finally, even though our coverage in ANZ is already significant, we continue to expand in adding more points of presence in the region.

This first year has certainly been interesting in so many aspects. It has been unexpected and challenging, but also a journey full of learnings I believe have made me a stronger individual and business leader. I work with a team full of talented individuals, customers that share our purpose, and key partners that make us stronger. With all these allies around us, I’m looking at the future full of optimism for our purpose to build a better, safer, and more resilient Internet. Join the cause.

Hey there! I am Els (short form for Elspeth) and I am the Field Marketing and Events Manager for APAC. I am responsible for building brand awareness and supporting our lovely sales team in acquiring new logos across APAC.

I was inspired to write about my first year in Cloudflare, because John, our CTO, encouraged more women to write for our Cloudflare blog after reviewing our blogging statistics and found out that more men than women blog for Cloudflare. I jumped at the chance because I thought this is a great way to share many side stories as people might not know about how it feels to work in Cloudflare.

Before I continue, I must mention that I really wanted to join Cloudflare after reading our co-founder Michelle’s reply on Quora regarding "What is it like to work in Cloudflare?." Michelle’s answer as follows:

“my answer is 'adult-like.' While we haven’t adopted this as our official company-wide mantra, I like the simplicity of that answer. People work hard, but go home at the end of the day. People care about their work and want to do a great job. When someone does a good job, their teammate tells them. When someone falls short, their colleague will let them know. I like that we communicate directly, no matter what seniority level you are.”

The main themes were centered around High Curiosity, Ability to get things done, and Empathy.

The answer took me by surprise. I have read so many replies by top leaders of leading companies in the world, and I have never seen such a down to earth reply!

I was eager to join the company and test it out.

Every new hire in Cloudflare will have to attend a two week orientation in San Francisco (well, they used to until COVID-19 hit and orientation has gone virtual), where they have a comprehensive program that exposes them to all the different functions of the company. My most memorable session was the one conducted by Matthew Prince, where he delivered a very engaging and theatrical crash course on the origins of Cloudflare and competitive landscape surrounding cloud computing. Even though the session took 1.5 hours, I enjoyed every second of it and I was very impressed with Matthew’s passion and conviction behind Cloudflare’s mission to build a better Internet.

There was also a very impressive session conducted by Joe Sullivan, our Chief Security Officer. Joe introduced us to the importance of cybersecurity through several real life examples and guided us through some key steps to protect ourselves. Joe left a very deep impression on me as he spoke in a very simple manner. This is important for someone like myself who didn’t come from a security background as I felt that it is important for me to understand why I am joining this company and why my contribution matters.

I also had the chance to meet the broader members of my marketing team. I had about twenty meetings arranged in the span of one week and I am thankful to everyone who took time out of their busy schedule to help me understand how the global team worked together. Needless to say everyone was really smart, nice, and down to earth. I left the San Francisco office feeling really good about my start in Cloudflare, but little did I know that was just the tip of the iceberg.

After I returned to Singapore, Krishna, my manager, quickly put me to work to focus on building a pipeline for the APAC region. In a short span of six months, I had to quickly bring myself up to speed to understand the systems and processes in place, in addition to executing events across the region to ensure that we have a continuous pipeline for our ever-growing sales team. I am going to be completely transparent here, it was overwhelming, stressful and I was expected to deliver results in a short period of time. However, it has also been the most exciting period of personal and professional growth for me, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to join an amazing team in one of the most exciting companies of the century.

As a new team member, I had to quickly understand the needs of the sales leaders from the ASEAN countries, ANZ, the Greater China Region, India, Japan, and Korea. There were so many things to learn and everyone was very supportive and helpful. More importantly, there were many challenges and mistakes made along the way I felt supported by the entire team throughout.

In my first six months, I had to immediately plan and execute an average of 28 events per quarter, ranging from flagship events like Gartner Security Risk Management conferences in Sydney and Mumbai, the largest gaming conference ChinaJoy in Shanghai, AWS series across the ASEAN countries and leading security conferences in Korea and Japan. When Cloudflare IPO-ed on September 13, 2019, I was tasked to organize an IPO party for over 150 people in our Singapore over a short span of 3 weeks. What an adventure!

At our largest event in Singapore, where over 30 Cloudflarians from the Singapore team took time to help out.

Just when I thought 28 events per quarter is an achievement (for myself), my team and I were given once in a lifetime opportunity to lead a series of projects related to our Japan office opening.  

"As the third largest economy, and one of the most Internet-connected countries in the world, Japan was a clear choice when considering expansion locations for our next APAC office,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Our new facility and team in Tokyo present a unique opportunity to be closer to our customers, and help even more businesses and users experience a better Internet across Japan and throughout the world.”

Japan is a new market for me and I had to start everything from scratch. I started off with launching our very first Japan brand campaign where the team worked closely with leading Japanese media companies to launch digital advertisements, advertorials, video campaigns to spread our awareness across Japan in just under 3 months. While it is a complete unknown path for us, the team was really good at experimenting with new ideas, analysis results, iterating and improving on our campaigns week by week.

Check out our amazing Japan city cloud designed by our very talented team 

I also had the opportunity to be part of our very first hybrid (physical and virtual) press conference that was held across Singapore and Tokyo, where we had 35 journalists participate (with 6 top-tier media in attendance and 29 journalists online). News of the office opening/event was covered in Japan's most influential business newspaper, Nikkei, in an article titled, "US IT giant Cloudflare establishes Japanese corporation.". I cannot wait to tell you more about what’s coming down the line!

With so many things going on, it is easy to lose sight of the long term goal. Jake, our CMO is very focused on ensuring the team remains engaged and motivated throughout their time in Cloudflare. He launched a mandatory career conversations program where the team had to have at least one discussion with their respective managers on how they would envision their future to be within the company. This is a very useful exercise for me as I was able to have an open discussion with my manager on the various options that I could consider as Cloudflare is a company which supports cross departmental/borders transitions. It is beneficial to know that I am able to explore different opportunities going forward and lock down some next steps on how I will get there. Exciting times!

As a young woman, I am very fortunate to be part of the APAC team led by Aliza Knox. Aliza is extremely passionate about encouraging women to pursue opportunities in business and tech. As a woman, I have never felt more comfortable under her leadership as gender discrimination is real and most companies are predominantly led by men. With Aliza, all opinions and ideas are strongly welcomed and I never felt bound by my age, seniority, experience to reach for the skies. It is ok to be ambitious, to do more, to ask questions, or something as simple as getting 15 mins of her time to ask if I should pursue an online course at MIT (and I did!).

Did I also mention Cloudflare's Employee Resource Group (ERG)? I am the APAC lead for Womenflare where our mission is to cultivate an inclusive, inspiring, and safe environment that supports, elevates, and ensures equal opportunities for success to all who identify as women at Cloudflare. As part of our global Womenflare initiative, I organised an International Women’s Day luncheon in March this year where we had members of our APAC leadership team share about their experiences on how they have managed their career and family commitments. Other ERG in Cloudflare includes Proudflare, where we support and provide resources for the LGBTQIA+ community, Afroflare, where we aim to build a better global Afro-community at Cloudflare and beyond, and many more!

I am writing this blogpost as we all embrace the challenges and opportunities present during COVID-19. When COVID-19 first hit APAC,  I was very impressed with how the global team exhibited flexibility to adapt to everyday challenges, with great empathy that it might be challenging to work from home, to how it is ok to try new things and make mistakes as long as we can learn from it.

Our Business Continuity Team provided regular employee communication on local guidelines and Work From Home next steps. Our office support team immediately supplied computer equipment/office chairs that employees can bring home for their remote working needs. Our Site Leads came up with different initiatives to ensure the team remains connected through a series of virtual yoga sessions, Friday wine down, and lunch and games. The latest activity we ran was Activeflare, where a group of us from the Singapore and Australia offices exercised together on a Saturday and drew a map of our activities using tracking technology. That was fun!

The global team has also launched a series of fireside chats where we get to hear from leaders of leading companies, which is a really nice touch where we get to gain exposure to the mind of great leaders which we otherwise would not have the opportunity to. My favourite so far is from Doug, our Chief Legal Officer and Katrin Suder, one of our Board Members.

My very first experience as a TV host on Cloudflare TV

Matthew, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO, recently launched Cloudflare TV for the team to experiment and connect with the Cloudflare community, even while we're locked down. And that community shares common interests in topics like web performance, Internet security, edge computing, and network reliability. Aliza and myself are hosting a series of Zoomelier in APAC soon to connect with winemakers and sommeliers across the region and share some interesting wine recommendations that one can drink with technology. So hope you'll tune in, geek out, feel part of our community, and learn more about Cloudflare and the people who are building it. Check out the Cloudflare TV Guide: cloudflare.tv/schedule

I am at the point where I feel like I have a good amount of experience to do a good job, but not good enough to be where I want to be. In Cloudflare, I strongly feel that “The more I learn, the less I realise I know” (Socrates). I aim to continuously learn and build up my capabilities to strategize and deliver results for the present and the future, and I must end this blogpost with my learnings from John, “overnight success takes at least 10 years, I read a lot to stay up to date on what’s happening internally and externally. The gym (exercise) is really important to me. It's challenging and takes my mind off everything. Many people seem to view the gym as dead time to fill with TED videos, podcasts or other “useless” activities. I love the fact that it’s the one time I stop thinking.” I have applied this learning to both my personal and professional life, and it made a huge difference. Thank you, John.

If you’re willing to join an impressive team and work for a very dynamic company to help create a better Internet, we’re looking for many different profiles in our different offices all over the planet! Let's have a look!

I’m excited to say that I’ve recently joined the Cloudflare team as Head of Japan. Cloudflare has had a presence in Japan for a while now, not only with its network spanning the country, but also with many Japanese customers and partners which I’m now looking forward to growing with. In this new role, I’m focused on expanding our capabilities in the Japanese market, building upon our current efforts, and helping more companies in the region address and put an end to the technical pain points they are facing. This is an exciting time for me and an important time for the company. Today, I’m particularly eager to share that we are opening Cloudflare’s first Japan office, in Tokyo! I can’t wait to grow the Cloudflare business and team here.

The web was built 25 years ago. This invention changed the way people connected—to anyone and anywhere—and the way we work, play, live, learn, and on. We have seen this become more and more complex. With complexities come difficulties, such as ensuring security, performance, and reliability while online. Cloudflare is helping to solve these challenges that businesses are facing in a very effective way, and I wanted to be a part of it. Even back to the days when I was with Cisco, where I got to know many people in the network technical community—many of these people have mentioned Cloudflare as the vendor for the future of the Internet. Cloudflare is in a unique position to help make the Internet better for everyone across the globe.

I want online users to have a better experience—one that’s fast, secure, and reliable—and I’m excited to help make this a reality while working with Cloudflare. I believe the team here is providing the tools to make the Internet better and easier, and is making customers happier. One thing that is important for me, one of my values you could say, is focusing on solving customers’ problems. This is something that I saw Cloudflare has always been deeply involved with as well. I’m passionate about helping more and more customers in Japan, and now in this new role, I’m ready to help make a better Internet part of their reality.

Some of the current challenges in Japan I see are that Japanese enterprises still have old on-prem systems and are late to move to the cloud. This includes companies that heavily rely on using the Internet and may be facing complexities or difficulties, which shouldn’t be the case. Cloudflare provides these very solutions to move to multi-cloud environments much faster and easier. We have been working with various customers in Japan already, and I’m excited to begin helping more and more businesses in the region. We’ve been committed to our partner network as well, which I’m excited to now be involved with and help grow even more. We have a number of channel partners in Japan, including large system integrators and mid-size cloud integrators, which cover various industries in the region. Cloudflare’s massive network, one of the largest in the world, currently spans 206 cities and more than 100 countries across the globe—including many in Asia-Pacific, and Osaka and Tokyo in Japan. This global network and team enables Japanese customers and partners (in various verticals and of all sizes) with the security, performance, and reliability solutions that are needed for their business-critical applications to connect to their users all across the world.

We are continuing to grow the Cloudflare team and are now hiring for roles in our first Japan office, in Tokyo. if you're interested in joining this ambitious mission to help build a better Internet—for everyone, including companies and users in Japan—please visit our Tokyo careers page here. You can see the open roles for this office, which include Sales, Marketing, Technical Support, and more. I can’t wait to see what the Cloudflare team does for the region and on.

I’m looking forward to enabling Japanese customers with the network and tools to scale their businesses. There are still many users that are building their security protections and other solutions by themselves in on-prem and cloud environments. If you are facing complex issues, or seeking security features in multi-cloud environments, looking to reduce cost, and on—reach out to me (maoba@cloudflare.com). We have a solution for that. We are here to help you.

We have exciting news: Cloudflare closed out the decade by reaching our 200th city* across 90+ countries. Each new location increases the security, performance, and reliability of the 20-million-plus Internet properties on our network. Over the last quarter, we turned up seven data centers spanning from Chattogram, Bangladesh all the way to the Hawaiian Islands:

• Chattogram & Dhaka, Bangladesh. These data centers are our first in Bangladesh, ensuring that its 161 million residents will have a better experience on our network.

• Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Honolulu is one of the most remote cities in the world; with our Honolulu data center up and running, Hawaiian visitors can be served 2,400 miles closer than ever before! Hawaii is a hub for many submarine cables in the Pacific, meaning that some Pacific Islands will also see significant improvements.

• Adelaide, Australia. Our 7th Australasian data center can be found “down under” in the capital of South Australia. Despite being Australia’s fifth-largest city, Adelaide is often overlooked for Australian interconnection. We, for one, are happy to establish a presence in it and its unique UTC+9:30 time zone!

• Thimphu, Bhutan. Bhutan is the seventh SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) country with a Cloudflare network presence. Thimphu is our first Bhutanese data center, continuing our mission of security and performance for all.

• St George’s, Grenada. Our Grenadian data center is joining the Grenada Internet Exchange (GREX), the first non-profit Internet Exchange (IX) in the English-speaking Caribbean.

We’ve come a long way since our launch in 2010, moving from colocating in key Internet hubs to fanning out across the globe and partnering with local ISPs. This has allowed us to offer security, performance, and reliability to Internet users in all corners of the world. In addition to the 35 cities we added in 2019, we expanded our existing data centers behind-the-scenes. We believe there are a lot of opportunities to harness in 2020 as we look to bring our network and its edge-computing power closer and closer to everyone on the Internet.

*Includes cities where we have data centers with active Internet ports and those where we are configuring our servers to handle traffic for more customers (at the time of publishing).

Beneath the veneer of glass and concrete, this is a city of surprises and many faces. On 3rd October 2019, we brought together a group of leaders from across a number of industries to connect in Central Jakarta, Indonesia.

The habit of sharing stories at the lunch table, exchanging ideas, and listening to ideas from the different viewpoints of people from all tiers, paying first-hand attention to all input from customers, and listening to the dreams of some of life’s warriors may sound simple but it is a source of inspiration and encouragement in helping the cyberspace community in this region.

And our new data center in Jakarta extends our Asia Pacific network to 64 cities, and our global network to 194 cities.

Right on time, Kate Fleming extended a warm welcome to our all our Indonesia guests. "We were especially appreciative of the investment of your time that you made coming to join us."

Kate, is the Head of Customer Success for APAC. Australian-born, Kate spent the past 5 years living in Malaysia and Singapore. She leads a team of Customer Success Managers in Singapore. The Customer Success team is dispersed across multiple offices and time zones. We are the advocates for Cloudflare Enterprise customers. We help with your on-boarding journey and various post sales activities from project and resource management planning to training, configuration recommendations, sharing best practices, point of escalation and more.

"Today, the Indonesian Cloudflare team would like to share with you some insights and best practices around how Cloudflare is not only a critical part of any organization’s cyber security planning, but is working towards building a better internet in the process.” - Kate

Ayush Verma, who is our Solutions Engineer for ASEAN and India, was there to unveil the latest cyber security trends. He shared insights on how to stay ahead of the game in the fast-charging online environment.

Get answers to questions like:How can I secure my site without sacrificing performance?What are the latest trends in malicious attacks — and how should I prepare?

Jullian Gafar, the CTO from PT Viva Media Baru.PT Viva Media Baru is an online media company based out of Jakarta, Indonesia.

Firman Gautama, the VP of Infrastructure & Security from PT. Global Tiket Network.PT. Global Tiket Network offer hotel, flight, car rental, train, world class event/concert and attraction tickets.

It was a golden opportunity to hear from the leaders themselves about what’s keeping them busy lately, their own approaches to cyber security, best practices, and easy-to-implement and cost-efficient strategies.  

Fireside Chat Highlights:  Shoutout from Pak Firman, who was very pleased with the support he received from Kartika. He said "most sales people are hard to reach after completing a sale. Kartika always goes the extra mile, she stays engaged with me. The Customer Experience is just exceptional.”

Thank you for giving us your time to connect. It brings us back to our roots and core mission of helping to build a better internet. Based on this principle “The Result Never Betrays the Effort’ we believe that what we are striving for today, by creating various innovations in our services and strategies to improve your business, will in time produce the best results. For this reason, we offer our endless thanks for your support and loyalty in continuing to push forward with us. Always at your service!

Cloudflare Event Crew in Indonesia #CloudflareJKTChris Chua (Organiser) | Kate Fleming | Bentara Frans | Ayush Verma | Welly Tandiono | Kartika Mulyo  | Riyan Baharudin

When I started, I spoke about growing our brand recognition in Asia and optimizing our reach to clients by building up teams and channel partners. I also mentioned a key reason behind my joining was Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet and focus on democratizing Internet tools that were once only available to large companies. I’m delighted to share that we’ve made great progress and are in a strong position to continue our rapid growth. It’s been a wonderful year, and I’m thrilled that I joined the company.

There has been a lot going on in our business, as well as in the region. Let’s start with Cloudflare Asia.

Our Singapore team has swelled from 40 people from 11 countries to almost 100 people from 19 nations. Our team is as diverse as our client base and keeps the office lively and innovative.

The Cloudflare Singapore Team

The number of Asian businesses choosing to work with us has more than doubled. You can check out what we’ve been doing with companies like Carousell, Vicroads, and 9GAG. Our relationships span all across the region, from India to Japan, from small business to large organizations, from startups to governments, and a wide variety of verticals from e-commerce to financial services.

To further expand our reach, we signed eight new partners representing seven markets and are in discussion with select others. We even held our first partner enablement bootcamp recently which was a big success.

Our First Partner Bootcamp in Asia

We moved into a larger and wonderful office in Singapore. Customers can come to Frasers Tower to see our Network Operations Center and stunning view of the city. We celebrated this new office and Asian Headquarters opening with two events where our co-founder and COO, Michelle Zatlyn presided. Dignitaries from the Singapore Economic Development Board, Singapore Cyber Security Association and the American Embassy cut the ribbon, and hundreds of customers, partners and friends joined us to kick off the Lunar New Year.

Celebrating our new office opening in Feb 2019

We have a wonderful community space that we are sharing for meet-ups. Developers, interest groups, and others from the community are welcome to use it. The first group to take advantage of this was IndoTech, a community of Indonesian professionals living in Singapore, who work in tech.

IndoTech meetup at the Cloudflare events space 

Asia is a large region and we are thrilled to expand to Australia. We have many local customers like AfterpayTouch, Fitness and Lifestyle Group, and the NIB group. We have run Worker focused meetups in Sydney and Melbourne as part of our Real World Serverless roadshow and shared what we learned about Noise on the Internet with 1.1.1.1 at AusNOG and NZNog. Today, we are announcing our expanded Australia presence. Incorporating into a new country is a big step and we’ve taken it. This is a good time to mention that we are hiring. If you want to join Cloudflare in Sydney, please get in touch.

Cloudflare has 165 data centers around the world. Since I’ve joined a year ago, we’ve added 46 cities globally, including 15 in APAC. We now have data centers in Pakistan and Vietnam. Around 20% of Cloudflare’s globally distributed network is in Asia.

We’ve added a number of great products, which can be found on our blog. Some additions that are especially pertinent to the region include adding UDP capability to Spectrum. Gaming clients typically use custom protocols based on UDP, which legacy systems don’t effectively protect. So our expansion of Spectrum has been eagerly received by the many mobile game developers across the region. Indeed, gamers have been using Spectrum even prior to this launch. One example is a mobile game producer where we protect their login/authentication servers that are TCP-based to mitigate DDoS attacks for the purpose of keeping their servers online for players to be able to log in and play.

The world is moving to serverless computing and Cloudflare is leading the way. Many of the companies in APAC are on the forefront of this trend and are leveraging Cloudflare to improve their infrastructure. One client is using Cloudflare Workers to speed up and improve capture rates of their analytics engine.

From a regional perspective, many countries in Asia are encouraging businesses to be digital-ready.  Governments around the region are spearheading programs to help SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), corporations and government departments take advantage of technology and innovation to capture economic gains. For example, Singapore announced SMEsGoDigital as part of the 2017 budget and Thailand recently launched the Thailand 4.0 initiative.

In addition, one interesting aspect of the Asian market is that a higher percentage of companies are using multi-cloud architecture. Whether it’s because these  companies need to cover different countries where one of the large cloud providers (eg AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Alicloud or IBM) is stronger than others, or because companies want to avoid “vendor lock-in”, many companies end up using several cloud compute partners.

Needless to say, it has been an exciting year. I am proud of what we have accomplished and looking forward to what we have left to do.

Given all this opportunity for growth, our team in Singapore is hiring! We have roles in Systems Reliability Engineering, Network Engineering, Technical Support Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Customer Success Engineering, Recruiting, Account Executives, Business Development Representatives, Sales Operations, Business Operations, and beyond. Check out our careers page.

Photo by alexander milo / Unsplash

Before starting as a freshman in university, I created an online portfolio for my photography. It has been a passion of mine for about 9 years. I tried a multitude of platforms but none afforded me the aesthetic control that I wanted. The only solution was to build and host my own site. I started learning HTML/CSS, a bit of JavaScript and jQuery and so on.

This led to me using the Koken CMS, and hosting it on DigitalOcean in a Docker container. What was left was SSL/TLS encryption and a CDN (my friends in Europe find the loading times unbearable). I tried ISRG’s Let’s Encrypt (SSL makes for a better Google rank, and ensures the connection is secure) but did not quite manage to get it to work (entirely my fault). I scrolled through Reddit, talked to my Microsoft Student Partners buddies, and found out about Cloudflare.

I was seeing orange.

Cloudflare has the security and performance features that I needed for SSL/TLS encryption and the CDN features for my website, and that is just scratching the surface. From then on, I learned about how Cloudflare came to be, their mission and emphasis on privacy and security. All of which became reasons why I applied for Cloudflare as a marketing intern. Being a part of a tech company whose mission and products I believe in is a pretty big deal for me.

Why is it a big deal?

I strongly believe in advocating for the right to speak freely - being able to hear all opinions of a topic whether I agree with them or not. Privacy ensures that people still have the power to speak about personal issues or speaking out against oppressive regimes without having their voices suppressed. Security relates to trust and credibility for end users and ensures that businesses do not resort to nefarious methods to compete such as acquiring DDoS services to shut down their competitors.

Cloudflare enables. And that is just a small part of the bigger picture that is to help create a better Internet for everyone.

A big part of working at Cloudflare is working with diverse cross-functional teams. I am a part of the APAC team based in Singapore, being the bridge to the marketing team in San Francisco alongside a fellow intern. Suffice to say, I have learned a lot about the business having worked with the amazing people who have been responsible for the region’s accelerating growth.

Two weeks into the internship, I was supporting an event in Malaysia meeting potential prospects and managing the event. This proved to be very valuable in understanding how we connect to our audience and the characteristics of the market that the event represents. It was definitely a learning experience to familiarise myself with the process in order to enable the sales team and being part of Cloudflare’s growth (more than 12 million protected domains). Through the trust and ownership that was given to me, I set about understanding the target audience and learning new tools as fast as possible.

Image source: Vollhov @ https://www.deviantart.com/vollhov

Being at Cloudflare feels like you are in a state-of-the-art starship. Simplicity with underlying innovation, sophistication and complexity. Cloudflare makes it super intuitive for users with their one-click features through its dashboard, but underneath those features lies a complex system of code that is also lightweight and efficient.

I suppose what really puts Cloudflare on the map for me is the 1.1.1.1 release. I was especially excited because finally I had an alternative DNS to use, all the more because I have always been an advocate of privacy and security. Believing in the mission and products that the company provides played an important role for me in applying to Cloudflare.

Being part of this ever evolving starship has certainly been an exhilarating ride. In my opinion, it will only keep accelerating towards the fringes of the galaxy, and beyond.

With about two months left at Cloudflare, and the events and campaigns coming up in rapid-fire fashion, I will certainly be ending my internship with a bang. Having to dig deep into learning one concept made me realise that it takes a long time to master, be it the intricacies of marketing or technicalities of a product. It is definitely a stimulating assault on the brain but in a good way.

I have learned a lot about working in a very diverse team; multicultural and cross-functional. Cloudflarians wear many hats – the myriad of backgrounds across teams means that there is never a shortage of differing opinions and ideas to share with others. This all the more helps create a refined approach towards building this mission of ours: to help build a better internet for everyone.

Here's a snippet of the diversity that lives and breathes in Cloudflare

Interested in @Cloudflare? Here it is in 7 different languages ? pic.twitter.com/byAvzZgUmY

— Mustafa Khalifa (@Mustafa_Khalifa) 10 October 2018

Advice for future interns

I have always had this philosophy in mind, from my favourite series of books: Dune.

Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of “things I know.” ― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

Always be curious, and absorb like Scrub Daddy sponge can.

Image source: Scrubdaddy.com

I’m a Californian with more than 20 years of experience growing businesses across Asia. I initially came to Asia with the Boston Consulting Group and since then I’ve helped Google and Twitter start and grow their businesses in Singapore and Asia. In many cases throughout my career, I’ve been one of the very first employees (sometimes the first) on the ground in this part of the world. To me, the Asian market presents an often untapped opportunity for companies looking to expand, and it’s a challenge that has appealed to me throughout my career.

This year's Chinese New Year celebration

I’m driven by opportunities to work with global businesses that drive change and are full of ambitious and passionate people. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet and the company is focused on democratizing Internet tools that were once only available to large companies. Making security and speed, which are necessary for any strong business, available to anyone with an Internet property, is truly a noble goal. That’s one of the reasons I’m most excited to work with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is also serious about culture and diversity, an area that’s very important to me. When I was considering joining Cloudflare, I watched videos from the Internet Summit, an annual event that Cloudflare hosts in its San Francisco office (we will be hosting a London version as well this year). One thing that really stood out for me is that nearly half of the speakers were women and all of the speakers came from different backgrounds. The topics could have been covered by a much more homogeneous group of men, but Cloudflare went the extra mile to make sure more diverse perspectives were represented. I’m extremely passionate about encouraging women to pursue opportunities in business and tech so watching so many women give insightful talks made me realize that this was a company I wanted to work for.

Now for a little about our work in the region. Cloudflare’s Singapore office opened more than two years ago and has more than 40 employees. Employees here hail from 16 countries and I’m proud to say that the Singapore office has the highest percentage of women.

Functions in Asia include, Solutions Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Network Operations, Recruiting, Product Development, Operations, Customer Success, and Technical Support. Our team here has made significant contributions in building Cloudflare’s performance and security products, features, and capabilities.

Celebrating Cloudflare's 7th birthday in Singapore

The Singapore team has also had great success serving Cloudflare’s regional customers. We have enterprise customers across all of Asia and across all verticals.

Much of the success in the Singapore office can be attributed to so much effort from all of our pioneering team, especially our first three employees in Singapore: Jimmy, Frankie, and Mark. I’d also like to call out Colin, head of our Sales team in Asia, James, our Solutions Engineering lead in Asia, and Grace Lin, who founded and led our Singapore office for the past two years, commuting back and forth from San Francisco to manage the office. I thank them for all of their hard work in growing Cloudflare’s presence in Asia and I’m excited to work alongside them in this next stage of growth.

I’m truly looking forward to helping Cloudflare grow its reach over the next five years.

If you’re interested in exploring careers at Cloudflare, we are hiring globally! Our team in Singapore is looking to expand across the region for roles in Systems Reliability Engineering, Network Engineering, Technical Support Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Customer Success Engineering, Recruiting, Account Executives, Business Development Representatives, Sales Operations, Business Operations, and more. Check out our careers page to learn more!