In March, governments all over the world issued stay-at-home orders, causing a mass migration to teleworking. Alongside many of our partners, Cloudflare launched free products and services supported by onboarding sessions to help our clients secure and accelerate their remote work environments. Over the past few months, a dedicated team of specialists met with hundreds of organizations - from tiny startups, to massive corporations - to help them extend better security and performance to a suddenly-remote workforce.
Most companies we heard from had a VPN in place, but it wasn’t set up to accommodate a full-on remote work environment. When employees began working from home, they found that the VPN was getting overloaded with requests, causing performance lags.
While many organizations had bought more VPN licenses to allow employees to connect to their tools, they found that just having licenses wasn’t enough: they needed to reduce the amount of traffic flowing through their VPN by taking select applications off of the private network.
We Were Built For This
My name is Dina and I am a Customer Success Manager (CSM) in our San Francisco office. I am responsible for ensuring the success of Cloudflare’s Enterprise customers and managing all of their post-sales experience. As CSMs, we bring strong product knowledge, best practices and a high degree of empathy to ensure our customers’ satisfaction with Cloudflare’s services. This is driven through delivering the value of our products and services to our customer’s business via regular check-ins and quarterly reviews.
One customer I work with, a service that connects physicians to patients over the Internet, was forced to respond to a requirement for the entire company to work-from-home within 48 hours. This company could not move their entire workforce to a VPN without overwhelming their appliances and IT Help Desk. Any interruption to business continuity could threaten the provider’s ability to deliver services to customers during a time of peak demand, and especially during a time when doctors’ office environments felt unsafe.
Cloudflare Access had been a product of interest for my customer for a while now, and the adoption of the product couldn’t have come at a better time. As an enterprise customer, they enlisted the help of our subject matter experts to troubleshoot the sudden WFH situation. With the help of the Cloudflare CSM, solution engineers, and product managers, the organization was able to migrate internally-hosted applications to Cloudflare Access in less than 15 minutes.
Hundreds of team members began using Cloudflare Access within the next 24 hours. We were able to operationalize a critical call center app without a VPN at the click of a button. In the words of the customer, “...we should have done this a long time ago. It’s beautiful, this is perfect.” Virtually overnight, over 700 users were immediately signed on, and more are being added daily as the company grows and working from home remains a necessity. It could even become a permanent way of working for many organizations around the world.
It’s More Than A Solution
At Cloudflare, our customers are our top priority. Our constant innovation and transparency maintain our customers’ trust and support. This particular telemedicine company has been a Cloudflare customer for 5 years, not only because of the technology, but because of those exact priorities we uphold.
The customer’s journey follows a pattern I see often in my role: this customer initially used Cloudflare for Infrastructure products to protect external sites - their website and customer-facing applications. Because they leverage our solutions in this way, the domain of their call center app was already IP whitelisted on Cloudflare via Zone lockdown, one of our Enterprise features. With their deep knowledge and experience with Cloudflare, they could easily apply the same benefits they were getting from WAF and CDN to their internal employees.
Throughout their tenure with Cloudflare, this customer has constantly interacted with us through events (when they were in-person ?), webinars, email communication, feature request reviews, and frequent catch-ups over the phone. These conversations provided regular opportunities for the customer to expand their knowledge of Cloudflare, build trust, and grow their usage of Cloudflare’s services. The customer first learned about our Access technology at Cloudflare Connect in NYC last year.
The event proved to be the perfect forum for them to interact with the Cloudflare community, discover new technology, and discuss and brainstorm with onsite technical experts. The customer had been using Cloudflare for our core security and performance services for a long time. They had been receiving value from our other services, and when COVID-19 hit, Cloudflare was there as a trusted advisor and partner to easily tackle this inevitable situation. Everything they’ve learned through their constant interaction with the Cloudflare team, and at Cloudflare events, finally came to fruition.
I tell this customer’s story to raise awareness and encourage our customers - and really anyone interested - to stay up to date with the constant innovation here at Cloudflare. We continue to host and facilitate events and webinars. This allows you, as our customer, to learn and derive value from our technology, so your business is further protected and optimized. After a webinar and one meeting with us, you can transition your whole work environment to virtual.
Listen in on webinars, attend events, and read up on our blog, developer docs, and support pages, so you can easily call us, and with a click of a button turn on the next feature that will enhance your site and work experience.
Interested in Learning More?
Join Cloudflare’s Product Managers each month to hear the latest highlights, including this month’s feature on Cloudflare for Teams and Cloudflare Workers.
Need help with your team working remotely? Cloudflare for Teams is free to try for up to 50 users. Learn more.