All posts by Dan Hollinger

Empowering our partners with the new Tenant Platform dashboard

Post Syndicated from Dan Hollinger original http://blog.cloudflare.com/tenant-platform-ui-ga/

Itching to get started? Apply to the Self Serve Partner Beta or Enterprise partner programs now.

Empowering our partners with the new Tenant Platform dashboard

Cloudflare has always worked closely with partners to help build a better Internet. From our earliest Hosting Partners, to our latest Cloudflare One program and Authorized Service Delivery partners, we are dedicated to supporting our peers across the networking and cybersecurity ecosystem to secure Enterprise networks, mission-critical applications, and remote employees. As part of that commitment, we are proud to announce the general availability of our first dashboard for our Tenant Platform, providing an intuitive user interface for agencies and partners to manage their client accounts.

Tenant Platform introduction

The first version of the Tenant Platform was created in 2018 to support one of our large integration partners, IBM Cloud. They needed a secure way to independently provision accounts for their clients, spin up custom subscriptions, invite service users within each new account, and begin to configure the service. This platform, although API only, worked extremely well with our OEM and integration partners that were including our solution within their current platform to support their customers.

Multi-Tenant Structure

User interface overview

As Cloudflare has expanded the type of partners and customers it works with, it became clear that a user interface would be required to support agency, service and system integration partners that needed the same administrative controls as our integration partners, but available within our core dashboard. This allows scaled account management to be available to our partners as well as large Enterprise customers managing multiple business units.

Accessing the platform

All of our current partner administrators are now able to access the Tenants link on the left hand navigation within the Cloudflare dashboard. This will place them within the Tenant Overview page.

Tenant Overview

Within the Tenant Overview, we surface our documentation and some basic information about the tenant system and the program level of the partner.

Account insights

After speaking with our partners, the ability to quickly assess the health of accounts and underlying zones was paramount. To this end, we prioritized surfacing account-level security and performance insights for all child accounts within the Tenant system. This allows partner support teams to immediately dive into a specific Account that may be experiencing an issue or misconfiguration.

Security Insights allow you to quickly confirm that an application is effectively onboarded.
Traffic Insights surface error rates across all child accounts. 

Managed accounts

An additional improvement is the creation of a Managed Account section under the Tenant category. This section allows you to quickly search for and get a summary of accounts in active management by your Tenant system. This table will include cumulative spend of the account, product activation reviews, and the most recent action from the account audit log. The goal is to provide a single page to understand the health of all of your managed accounts, and jump into the specific account when necessary.  

Managed Accounts provide a summary of all child accounts.

Just getting started

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We know we cannot do that alone, and we treasure all of our partners that have worked with us to accomplish that mission across our technical, channel and alliance relationships. Throughout 2023 and 2024, we look to continue to grow our Tenant Platform across a few key areas. We have a robust roadmap to continue to mature our API and UI for tenant user management, centralized subscription management, billing and analytics rollups, and other foundational improvements. Our goal is to make Cloudflare the vendor of choice to seamlessly integrate with our partner’s product and service offerings for CDN, WAF, DDoS, Zero Trust, Workers and more.

Would you like to learn more?

New partner program for SMB agencies & hosting partners now in closed beta

Post Syndicated from Dan Hollinger original https://blog.cloudflare.com/self-serve-partners-beta/

New partner program for SMB agencies & hosting partners now in closed beta

A fundamental principle here at Cloudflare has always been that we want to serve everyone – from individual developers to small businesses to large corporations. In the earliest days, we provided services to hosting partners and resellers around the globe, who helped bring Cloudflare to thousands of domains with free caching and DDoS protection for shared infrastructures.

Today, we want to reinforce our commitment to our hosting ecosystem and small business partners that leverage Cloudflare to help bring a better Internet experience to their customers. We’ve been building a robust multi-tenant partner platform that we will begin to open up to everyone searching for a faster, safer, and better Internet experience. This platform will come in the form of a Self Serve Partner program that will allow SMB agencies & hosting partners to create accounts for all their customers under one dashboard, consolidate billing, and provide discounted plans to our partners.

Deprecation of our legacy APIs

To make way for the new, we first must discuss the end-of-life of some of Cloudflare’s earliest APIs. Built and launched in 2011, our Hosting and Optimized Partner Programs allowed our initial CDN and DDoS solutions to expand to brand-new audiences around the globe. These APIs were essential for fueling growth in the earliest days of Cloudflare supporting reseller partners, hosting partners, and external plugins that helped make implementing Cloudflare easier than ever.
On November 1, 2022 – Cloudflare will be discontinuing support for our Host and Reseller APIs. After this date:

  • Management of zones, users, and configurations via the Host or Reseller API will be disabled.
  • Any plugins leveraging these APIs will no longer be functional. This includes our legacy cPanel, Plesk and WHMCS plugins. We recommend partners and users begin to work directly within the Cloudflare dashboard for any future configuration management.
  • Any domains created by these APIs will continue to function and traffic will not be impacted after the depreciation period. Customer traffic will not be impacted during the deprecation, and we’ve been working closely with our partners to ensure these domains are transitioned to customer-management where preferred or migrated when appropriate to the new partner platform.
  • Any active specialized subscriptions will be mapped to our current zone plans.
    We are grateful for all of our earliest partners that trusted Cloudflare to increase the security and improve performance for their customer’s domains. All of our partners still leveraging our APIs should have received a communication with our deprecation schedule and next steps. And if there are any additional questions, they can be directed to [email protected].
New partner program for SMB agencies & hosting partners now in closed beta

Our New Partner Platform

As our solution offering and network grew, these early APIs were not well-equipped to scale with them. Cloudflare has continued to grow its network to over 275 cities and expand well beyond just web performance and security. With a full portfolio of Application Services, Zero Trust Services, Developer and Network solutions, our specialized plans and APIs quickly began to limit our partners instead of empowering them. Cloudflare announced our revamped partner platform a few years ago, and it has since been used with some of our largest integration and service partners supporting our newest SASE and Zero Trust offerings.

Self-serve partnerships in closed beta

With the deprecation of our legacy APIs, we are opening up our Partner Platform to a broader base of partners with a Self-Serve Partner program. Working in tandem with our Self-Serve teams, we’ve been ramping up initial test partners since late last year. Now, we’re excited to announce a path forward for agencies, regional MSPs, and hosting providers that still rely on Cloudflare to help their customers experience a better, faster, and safer Internet:

  • Multi-Tenant Account Support
    • Partners will have the ability to create individual customer accounts and manage individual user access to each one from our dashboard or via our Tenant API.
  • Centralized Self-Serve Billing
    • Partners will have the ability to own self-serve billing across each account with a single billing profile, ensuring subscription management is seamless across every account.

New partner program for SMB agencies & hosting partners now in closed beta

  • Access to full catalog of Cloudflare Self-Serve Products & Add-Ons
    • Every feature and add-on that Cloudflare has built will now be available to self-serve partners via the dashboard and API. End-customers will be able to implement load-balancing, Spectrum for TCP/UDP applications, and Workers for deploying code at the edge. Our partner platform ensures partners and customers are getting the most of their Cloudflare solution.
  • Self-Service Plan Discounting
    • We want to reward our partners for working with us and developing expertise across our solution. As part of our program commitments, we are offering volume discounts across all subscription renewals.
  • No Upfront Commitments
    • We’ve heard from many of you that you enjoy working with Cloudflare, but cannot support some minimums for our Enterprise partner programs. This program is built to help you get started, with no upfront commitments for qualified partners.

Comparing our partner programs

Self-Serve Partner Program New Cloudflare One Partner Program Enterprise Reseller & Services Program
Status Closed Beta Early Access General Access
Tiers N/A N/A Select Advanced Elite
Discount Beta Discount – 20% 25-50% 30-40%
Revenue Commitment No No Yes
Training & Enablement Self-Serve Cloudflare University Specialized Training Cloudflare University Specialized Training In-Person Training
Partner Account Resources No – Self Serve Yes – Tier Dependent Yes – Tier Dependent

Sign Up Now

If you want to start using our partner platform, sign up for the closed beta: we plan to start enabling access throughout this year. We’re looking forward to collecting feedback from each of you and learning how we can improve your end-customers experience with our global platform.

Ain’t seen nothing yet…

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We know we cannot do that alone, and we treasure all of our partners that have worked with us to accomplish that mission across our technical, channel and alliance relationships. Throughout 2022 and 2023, we look to continue to grow our Partner Platform across a few key areas to make it easier to use and seamless to integrate into your current offering across CDN, DDoS, Zero Trust, Workers and more.

  • Enhanced Partner Dashboard
  • Expanded Zero Trust Bundles for Partners
  • Additional Partner Service Opportunities
  • Select training and other Partner-only benefits

More Information:

Become an Enterprise Partner: Partner Portal

Sign Up for the Self-Serve Partner Program

Reach out to [email protected]