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.

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.

As it turns out, it takes a lot of work to stop massive attacks and to help make the web faster. Over the past six months, our entire team has contributed in every way imaginable to more than double the capacity of our global network. Below is a behind-the-scenes look into how we keep our global network running.

Along the way we’ve encountered many surprises—some fun and some cringe worthy—that have taught us about our team, our data centers and overcoming challenges that occasionally seem beyond our control.

• San Jose, US (SJC): Our counsel, Ken, is great at pumpkin carving, and even better at standing up to protect the privacy rights of our users (including against Kanye West’s army of lawyers). What you may not have known is that he is happiest in the data center (not to mention our cabling was much prettier when he finished!).

  

  Ken, our counsel

• Los Angeles, US (LAX): Our engineers monitor our network around the clock. Occasionally this means juggling multiple tasks. During our most recent upgrade, Joshua (Systems Reliability Engineer & super dad) managed to snatch a moment to put his kids to bed while managing simultaneous upgrades in Los Angeles and Stockholm.

• Chicago, US (ORD): Just before our Chicago upgrade we learned that our carrier had misplaced a shipment of memory. Fortunately, Nitin (Special Projects) averted disaster and got the courier to radio the driver (it took some convincing!), find and grab our DIMMs, and get the install done in time. When most people think of Chicago they think of the ‘95-96 Chicago Bulls (arguably the greatest basketball team to step foot on this earth). When we think of Chicago, our minds turn to the bullwhip effect. We precisely plan every data center launch and upgrade throughout the entire supply chain—from cables to servers to shipping schedules—to control against situations where precautions amplify errors.

• Dallas, US (DFW): At CloudFlare, stamina is key. Trey (Solution Engineer) experienced this first hand. Despite working through the night on our Dallas upgrade, he still managed to catch a 6:30 AM flight the following morning to San Antonio, where he ran a workshop for our friends at Rackspace.

• Ashburn, US (IAD): An important customer meeting the following morning didn’t stop Matthew (CEO) and Trey (Solution Engineer) from working through the night to upgrade our Ashburn facility. Trey even realized he could use his toenail clippers to save time cutting zipties and keep the install moving.

Home is where the datacenter is

• Hong Kong, HK (HKG): After speaking at an Internet security conference in China, Joshua (Special Projects Lead) spent three consecutive nights upgrading our Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong data centers. In addition to the data center, he found airport lounges and taxis to be equally habitable.

• London, GB (LHR): CloudFlare’s first international office opened in London in 2013. Since then we’ve enlisted an amazing team of engineers to keep our network humming 24x7x365. On more than a few occasions, James (Systems Reliability Engineer), Marty (Support Engineer) and Simon (Support Engineer) have found a warm room full of servers in our London facility a comfort on a bitter winter night.

• Stockholm, SE (ARN): Simon (Support Engineer) managed to navigate to the local Kjell to pick up a few needed power adapters, and then braved the 1° C cold outside of our Stockholm data center for a bit longer than he would have liked while waiting for an access card.

• Miami, US (MIA): We take security seriously, and so do our data center partners. Justin (Systems Reliability Engineer) was at least a little intimidated to find guards armed with machine guns protecting the entrance of our Miami facility.

• Tokyo, JP (NRT): We love our data centers so much that we even name our conference rooms after them. As our San Francisco office expands (we’ve now knocked down two walls!), we’ve named the latest NRT.

New challenges

• Atlanta, US (ATL): Each of our racks around the world are fitted with high tech PDUs (power distribution units) that allow for remote monitoring and power cycling. This allows us to monitor our infrastructure in real-time, and react at a moment’s notice. When our colocation provider in Atlanta told us that our PDU wouldn’t fit, giving up wasn’t an option. Joshua (Special Projects Lead) proposed a rack extender to do the trick!

• Paris, FR (CDG): Imagine being told that equipment you had just shipped 5,000 miles across the globe was about to be sent right back. Jérôme (Network Engineer), one of our resident French speakers, saved the day and made sure our equipment stayed right where it belonged: working hard in support of one of our busiest datacenters. Merci Jérôme!

• Seattle, US (SEA): We install console servers with out-of-band, cellular Internet access in each of our data centers to remotely manage our infrastructure in the case our primary Internet connectivity is lost. While this makes it easier to address connectivity issues, installing the equipment itself can occasionally be more difficult. With a SIM card stubbornly lodged into our console server in Seattle, Jerome (Partner Engineer) used what he had available—namely, dental floss and a pair of forceps—to get the job done in a way that even MacGyver would approve.

• Seoul, KR (ICN): Korea ranks near the top of most challenging locations to import equipment into (right up there with Warsaw). Fortunately, having facilitated hundreds of shipments in dozens of countries, Nitin (Special Projects) was able to break through a two month logjam in which Incheon airport became a temporary home for some of our equipment. Among his other talents, Nitin can now hum the FedEx and DHL songs in nearly any language of your choice.

• Valparaíso, CL (SCL): Sometimes events are just out of one’s control. To launch our newest data center we had to wait through multiple customs strikes before equipment could arrive. Still, the show went on. Tom (Network Engineer) worked through Christmas to shave 170ms off of latency for our users in Latin America.

What’s in store for 2014, you ask? Over the next 12 months we will significantly expand our data center footprint, adding facilities in regions we currently lack coverage: Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia. China is our second largest market, Brazil is our third: in 2014 we’ll be significantly expanding our network to better serve these customers.

If this sounds like fun, and if you enjoy a few surprises every once in a while, please consider joining us. We’re actively recruiting for someone passionate and talented to assist with our expansion.

We just turned on our latest data center in Seoul, Korea. It's our 23rd data center and the last of the 9 new cities as part of this latest data center expansion. Seoul expands our presence in Asia to five data centers for the Asia-Pacific region: Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney.

Seoul has invested heavily in making the Internet fast for web surfers in the region. Seoul was named one of the most connected cities in the world, with one of the highest penetrations of broadband in the world and 100Mbps commercial Internet connections available for as little as US$30/month.

Fast connections are great within the country, they often bottleneck when they have to travel across the over-subscribed trans-oceanic cables. Given that Korean traffic needs to pass over trans-oceanic cables to reach the rest of the Internet (unless there's a transit provider through North Korea we're not aware of) those fast connections can come to a crawl if they have to leave the country.

While fast Internet connections have a lot of positives, one of the challenges of fast, fat pipes is that they can be used to launch significant DDoS attacks. In Seoul, there has been a marked increase in large attacks launched from the country's super speed infrastructure.

Given all of this, CloudFlare is a perfect fit for Seoul. Since we cache content for sites on CloudFlare's network locally in Seoul those fast connections can remain fast end-to-end. Moreover, since we're good at mitigating DDoS attacks, Korean businesses faced with attacks from increasingly powerful local botnets can sign up for CloudFlare, stop the attacks, and still maintain the performance that the country has come to expect.

This is the last of the nine new cities we're launching as part of this latest expansion effort, but our ops and networking teams are already hard at work planning our next expansion wave. We know there are regions of the world that are in need of some CloudFlare love: South America, India, Africa, and China. All of them have their own unique challenges, but we're hard at work finding ways to overcome them.

CloudFlare's goal is to build a better web for everyone. With each new data center we get closer to building a network that will allow us to achieve that goal. Stay tuned because there's a lot more to come.