Steve Bray: Why I joined Cloudflare

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.