We are thrilled to announce that Cloudflare has been positioned in the Leaders category in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Commercial CDN 2022 Vendor Assessment(doc #US47652821, March 2022).
You can download a complimentary copy here.
The IDC MarketScape evaluated 10 CDN vendors based on their current capabilities and future strategies for delivering Commercial CDN services. Cloudflare is recognized as a Leader.
At Cloudflare, we release products at a dizzying pace. When we talk to our customers, we hear again and again that they appreciate Cloudflare for our relentless innovation. In 2021 alone, over the course of seven Innovation Weeks, we launched a diverse set of products and services that made our customers’ experiences on the Internet even faster, more secure, more reliable, and more private.
We leverage economies of scale and network effects to innovate at a fast pace. Of course, there’s more to our secret sauce than our pace of innovation. In the report, IDC notes that Cloudflare is “a highly innovative vendor and continues to invest in its competencies to support advanced technologies such as virtualization, serverless, AI/ML, IoT, HTTP3, 5G and (mobile) edge computing.” In addition, IDC also recognizes Cloudflare for its “integrated SASE offering (that) is appealing to global enterprise customers.”
Built for the modern Internet
Building fast scalable applications on the modern Internet requires more than just caching static content on servers around the world. Developers need to be able to build applications without worrying about underlying infrastructure. A few years ago, we set out to revolutionize the way applications are built, so developers didn’t have to worry about scale, speed, or even compliance. Our goal was to let them build the code, while we handle the rest. Our serverless platform, Cloudflare Workers, aimed to be the easiest, most powerful, and most customizable platform for developers to build and deploy their applications.
Workers was designed from the ground up for an edge-first serverless model. Since Cloudflare started with a distributed edge network, rather than trying to push compute from large centralized data centers out into the edge, working under those constraints forced us to innovate.
Today, Workers services hundreds of thousands of developers, ranging from hobbyists to enterprises all over the world, serving millions of requests per second.
According to the IDC MarketScape: “The Cloudflare Workers developer platform, based on an isolate serverless architecture, is highly customizable and provides customers with a shortened time to market which is crucial in this digitally led market.”
Data you care about, at your fingertips
Our customers today have access to extensive analytics on the dashboard and via the API around network performance, firewall actions, cache ratios, and more. We provide analytics based on raw events, which means that we go beyond simple metrics and provide powerful filtering and analysis capabilities on high-dimensionality data.
And our insights are actionable. For example, customers who are looking to optimize cache performance can analyze specific URLs and see not just hits and misses but content that is expired or revalidated (indicating a short URL). All events, both directly in the console and in the logs, are available within 30 seconds or less.
The IDC MarketScape notes that the “self-serve portal and capabilities that include dashboards with detailed analytics as well as actionable content delivery and security analytics are complemented by a comprehensive enhanced services suite for enterprise grade customers.”
The only unified SASE solution in the market
Cloudflare’s SASE offering, Cloudflare One, continues to grow and provides a unified and comprehensive solution to our customers. With our SASE offering, we aim to be the network that any business can plug into to deliver the fastest, most reliable, and most secure experiences to their customers. Cloudflare One combines network connectivity services with Zero Trust security services on our purpose-built global network.
Cloudflare Access and Gateway services natively work together to secure connectivity for any user to any application and Internet destination. To enhance threat and data protection, Cloudflare Browser Isolation and CASB services natively work across both Access and Gateway to fully control data in transit, at rest, and in use.
The old model of the corporate network has been made obsolete by mobile, SaaS, and the public cloud. We believe Zero Trust networking is the future, and we are proud to be enabling that future. The IDC MarketScape notes: “Cloudflare’s enterprise security Zero Trust services stack is extensive and meets secure access requirements of the distributed workforce. Its data localization suite and integrated SASE offering is appealing to global enterprise customers.“
A one-stop, truly global solution
Many global companies today looking to do business in China often are restricted in their operations due to the country’s unique regulatory, political, and trade policies.
Core to Cloudflare’s mission of helping build a better Internet is making it easy for our customers to improve the performance, security, and reliability of their digital properties, no matter where in the world they might be, and this includes mainland China. Our partnership with JD Cloud & AI allows international businesses to grow their online presence in China without having to worry about managing separate tools with separate vendors for security and performance in China.
Just last year, we made advancements to allow customers to be able to serve their DNS in mainland China. This means DNS queries are answered directly from one of the JD Cloud Points of Presence (PoPs), leading to faster response times and improved reliability. This in addition to providing DDoS protection, WAF, serverless compute, SSL/TLS, and caching services from more than 35 locations in mainland China.
Here’s what the IDC MarketScape noted about Cloudflare’s China network: “Cloudflare's strategic partnership with JD Cloud enables the vendor to provide its customers cached content in-country at any of their China data centers from origins outside of mainland China and provide the same Internet performance, security, and reliability experience in China as the rest of the world.”
A unified network that is fast, secure, reliable, customizable, and global
One of the earliest architectural decisions we made was to run the same software stack of our services across our ever-growing fleet of servers and data centers. So whether it is content caching, serverless compute, zero trust functionality, or our other performance, security, or reliability services, we run them from all of our physical points of presence. This also translates into faster performance and robust security policies for our customers, all managed from the same dashboard or APIs. This strategy has been a key enabler for us to expand our customer base significantly over the years. Today, Cloudflare’s network spans 250 cities across 100+ countries and has millions of customers, of which more than 140,000 are paying customers.
In the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Commercial CDN 2022 Vendor Assessment, IDC notes, “[Cloudflare’s] clear strategy to invest in new technology but also expand its network as well as its sales machine across these new territories has resulted in a tremendous growth curve in the past years.”
To that, we’d humbly like to say that we are just getting started.
Stay tuned for more product and feature announcements on our blog. If you're interested in contributing to Cloudflare's mission, we'd love to hear from you.