Tag Archives: APAC

Cloudflare’s network expansion in Indonesia

Post Syndicated from Joanne Liew original https://blog.cloudflare.com/indonesia/

Cloudflare's network expansion in Indonesia

Cloudflare's network expansion in Indonesia

As home to over 200 million Internet users and the fourth-largest population in the world, Indonesians depend on fast and reliable Internet, but this has always been a challenging part of the world for Internet infrastructure. This has real world implications on performance and reliability (IP transit is on average 6x more expensive than our major South East Asian interconnection markets). That said, first we wanted to share what makes things challenging in Indonesia; geography, infrastructure, and market dynamics.

Geography: The Internet backbone for many countries is almost entirely delivered by terrestrial fiber optic cables, where connectivity is more affordable and easier to build when the land mass is contiguous and there is a concentrated population distribution. However, Indonesia is a collection of over 18,000 islands, spanning three time zones, and approximately 3,200 miles (5,100 km) east to west. By comparison, the United States is 2,800 miles (4,500 km) east to west. While parts of Indonesia are geographically close to Singapore (the regional Internet hub with over 60% of the region’s data centers) given how large Indonesia is, much of it is far away.

Infrastructure: Indonesia is a large country and to connect it to the rest of the Internet it currently relies on submarine fiber optic cables. There are a total of 22 separate submarine cables connecting Indonesia to Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and onward. Many of the cable systems cross the Strait of Malacca, a narrow stretch of water, between the Malay Peninsula (Peninsular Malaysia) and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the southwest, connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This makes reliability challenging as a result of human activities, such as ships dropping their anchors, fishing trawlers, and dredging as it is one of the world’s top five busiest shipping lanes. Additionally, Indonesia is geographically located in a very active seismic zone and is very earthquake prone.

There are a number of new submarine cable systems that have come online and four significant builds planned (Apricot, ACC-1, Echo and Nui) that will improve both available capacity and cost economics in the market. Right now the cost is still significantly higher than comparable distances. For example Jakarta to Singapore is approximately 60 times more expensive than a service the same distance would be in the continental US or Europe for a 100Gbps wavelength service. Staying in Asia, a similar distance from Hong Kong to Taiwan costs around 1/6th that of Jakarta to Singapore.

Cloudflare's network expansion in Indonesia

Cloudflare's network expansion in Indonesia
Cyber 1 and Cyber 3 (NTT NexCenter) Data Center Buildings in Jakarta, 2019 (Photo Credit: Tom Paseka).

Cloudflare's network expansion in Indonesia
Picture of Cyber 1 Lobby Directory

While areas like Batam are becoming increasingly popular for data center builds due to its proximity to Singapore, Jakarta is still the most developed and mature market. It has the largest and best interconnected data centers in the country, including the two pictured.

Cloudflare is deployed in the facility on the right (NTT NexCenter), however most ISPs are inside the building on the left (Cyber 1). The two buildings are approximately 30-50 meters apart, yet it’s surprisingly difficult to be able to connect between them. One of the reasons why is market fragmentation and how many options are available. In the adjacent picture of the Cyber 1 building lobby directory many of the listings are unique data centers each with different policies and access conditions.

In the past, we’ve talked about the Cost of Bandwidth around the world (and updated here), but we’ve never talked about Indonesia specifically. Using the same methodology as we’ve used in the past, Indonesia’s cost is 43x times more expensive than North America or Europe, or even multiples more expensive than other countries in Asia.

Market dynamics: While Indonesia has good and functioning Internet Exchanges, there are a few ISPs who dominate the market. The three largest ISPs in the country (Telkom Indonesia, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and XL Axiata) collectively control 80% of the market, while Telkom Indonesia alone has a market share of around 60% by revenue.

This results in Telkom Indonesia having a heavily dominant market share position to leverage resulting in refusal to peer, or exchange Internet traffic in Indonesia without expensive payments, or instead, preferring to connect to other networks outside of Indonesia, introducing latency and diminished performance.

Despite all of these challenges, our network has come a long way since our initial deployment to Jakarta in 2019.

We’ve established:

  • A carrier neutral local point of presence at NTT Indonesia Nexcenter Data Center, one of the major interconnection hubs in Jakarta
  • An edge partnership point of presence in Yogyakarta with CitranetIX
  • Direct interconnections in country with two of the top three networks.
  • Peering across three of the larger local internet exchanges, Indonesia Internet Exchange, Jakarta Internet Exchange and Biznet Internet Exchange
  • Dedicated 100G wavelength transport back to Singapore

All of this results in a more performant and reliable network for our local customers.

We wanted to see how our network is performing since deployment. We mentioned during Speed Week in 2021 how we benchmark against different networks, and sharing some of those benchmarks here.

At the end of December 2021, Cloudflare was only faster in a few networks, as compared to other providers in Indonesia.

Cloudflare's network expansion in Indonesia

Fast forward twelve months to December 2022, Cloudflare is significantly faster in even more networks.

Cloudflare's network expansion in Indonesia

The TCP protocol is a connection-oriented protocol, which means that a connection is established and maintained until the application programs at each end have finished exchanging messages. The Connect Time summarizes how fast a session can be set up between a client and a server over a network. TTLB (or time to last byte) is the time taken to send the entire response to the web browser. It’s a good measure of how long a complete download takes. Check out our recent blog on Benchmarking Edge Network Performance for more information on how we measure the performance of our network and benchmark ourselves against industry players.

On closer inspection against the three major ISPs specifically, we’re the top provider for two out of the three networks. Cloudflare’s performance has improved year-on-year (16% reduction) and continues to lead (comparative to the other networks) meaning faster and more responsive services for our customers.

Cloudflare's network expansion in Indonesia

Helping build a better Internet for Indonesia doesn’t stop here and there is always more work to be done! We want to be the number one network everywhere and won’t rest until we are. We are continuing to connect to more networks locally, invest in direct submarine cable capacity, as well as further deployments into new data center buildings, Internet Exchanges and new cities too!

Are you operating a network and not yet peering with Cloudflare? Log-in to our Peering Portal or find out more information here for ways to set up peering, or request we deploy nodes into your network directly.

Alex Kim: Why I joined Cloudflare

Post Syndicated from Alex Kim original https://blog.cloudflare.com/alex-kim-why-i-joined-cloudflare/

Alex Kim: Why I joined Cloudflare

Alex Kim: Why I joined Cloudflare

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.

A little about 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.

Why Cloudflare

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.

The vision for the future…

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.

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

Post Syndicated from Achiel van der Mandele original https://blog.cloudflare.com/regional-services-comes-to-apac/

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

This post is also available in Deutsch, Français.

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

We announced the Data Localization Suite in 2020, when requirements for data localization were already important in the European Union. Since then, we’ve witnessed a growing trend toward localization globally. We are thrilled to expand our coverage to these countries in Asia Pacific, allowing more customers to use Cloudflare by giving them precise control over which parts of the Cloudflare network are able to perform advanced functions like WAF or Bot Management that require inspecting traffic.

Regional Services, a recap

In 2020, we introduced (Regional Services), a new way for customers to use Cloudflare. With Regional Services, customers can limit which data centers actually decrypt and inspect traffic. This helps because certain customers are affected by regulations on where they are allowed to service traffic. Others have agreements with their customers as part of contracts specifying exactly where traffic is allowed to be decrypted and inspected.

As one German bank told us: “We can look at the rules and regulations and debate them all we want. As long as you promise me that no machine outside the European Union will see a decrypted bank account number belonging to one of my customers, we’re happy to use Cloudflare in any capacity”.

Under normal operation, Cloudflare uses its entire network to perform all functions. This is what most customers want: leverage all of Cloudflare’s data centers so that you always service traffic to eyeballs as quickly as possible. Increasingly, we are seeing customers that wish to strictly limit which data centers service their traffic. With Regional Services, customers can use Cloudflare’s network but limit which data centers perform the actual decryption. Products that require decryption, such as WAF, Bot Management and Workers will only be applied within those data centers.

How does Regional Services work?

You might be asking yourself: how does that even work? Doesn’t Cloudflare operate an anycast network? Cloudflare was built from the bottom up to leverage anycast, a routing protocol. All of Cloudflare’s data centers advertise the same IP addresses through Border Gateway Protocol. Whichever data center is closest to you from a network point of view is the one that you’ll hit.

This is great for two reasons. The first is that the closer the data center to you, the faster the reply. The second great benefit is that this comes in very handy when dealing with large DDoS attacks. Volumetric DDoS attacks throw a lot of bogus traffic at you, which overwhelms network capacity. Cloudflare’s anycast network is great at taking on these attacks because they get distributed across the entire network.

Anycast doesn’t respect regional borders, it doesn’t even know about them. Which is why out of the box, Cloudflare can’t guarantee that traffic inside a country will also be serviced there. Although typically you’ll hit a data center inside your country, it’s very possible that your Internet Service Provider will send traffic to a network that might route it to a different country.

Regional Services solves that: when turned on, each data center becomes aware of which region it is operating in. If a user from a country hits a data center that doesn’t match the region that the customer has selected, we simply forward the raw TCP stream in encrypted form. Once it reaches a data center inside the right region, we decrypt and apply all Layer 7 products. This covers products such as CDN, WAF, Bot Management and Workers.

Let’s take an example. A user is in Kerala, India and their Internet Service Provider has determined that the fastest path to one of our data centers is to Colombo, Sri Lanka. In this example, a customer may have selected India as the sole region within which traffic should be serviced. The Colombo data center sees that this traffic is meant for the India region. It does not decrypt, but instead forwards it to the closest data center inside India. There, we decrypt and products such as WAF and Workers are applied as if the traffic had hit the data center directly.

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

Bringing Regional Services to Asia

Historically, we’ve seen most interest in Regional Services in geographic regions such as the European Union and the Americas. Over the past few years, however, we are seeing a lot of interest from Asia Pacific. Based on customer feedback and analysis on regulations we quickly concluded there were three key regions we needed to support: India, Japan and Australia. We’re proud to say that all three are now generally available for use today.

But we’re not done yet! We realize there are many more customers that require localization to their particular region. We’re looking to add many more in the near future and are working hard to make it easier to support more of them. If you have a region in mind, we’d love to hear it!

India, Japan and Australia are all live today! If you’re interested in using the Data Localization Suite, contact your account team!

Cloudflare deployment in Guam

Post Syndicated from David Antunes original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-deployment-in-guam/

Cloudflare deployment in Guam

Cloudflare deployment in Guam

Having fast Internet properties means being as few milliseconds as possible away from our customers and their users, no matter where they are on Earth. And because of the design of Cloudflare’s network we don’t just make Internet properties faster by being closer, we bring our Zero Trust services closer too. So whether you’re connecting to a public API, a website, a SaaS application, or your company’s internal applications, we’re close by.

This is possible by adding new cities, partners, capacity, and cables. And we have seen over and over again how making the Internet faster in a region also can have a clear impact on traffic: if the experience is quicker, people usually do more online.

Cloudflare’s network keeps increasing, and its global footprint does so accordingly. In April 2022 we announced that the Cloudflare network now spans 275 cities and the number keeps growing.

In this blog post we highlight the deployment of our data center in Hagatna, Guam.

Why a blog about Guam?

Guam is about 2,400 km from both Tokyo in the north and Manila in the west, and about 6,100 km from Honolulu in the east. Honolulu itself is the most remote major city in the US and one of the most remote in the world, the closest major city from it being San Francisco, California at 3,700 km. From here one can derive how far Guam is from the US to the west and from Asia to the east.

Cloudflare deployment in Guam
Figure 1: Guam Geographical Location.

Why is this relevant? As explained here, latency is the time it takes for data to pass from one point on a network to another. And one of the main reasons behind network latency is the distance between client devices — like a browser on a mobile phone — making requests and the servers responding to those requests. So, if we consider where Guam is geographically, we get a good picture about how Guam’s residents can be affected by the long distances their Internet requests, and responses, have to travel.

This is why every time Cloudflare adds a new location, we help make the Internet a bit faster. The reason is that every new location brings Cloudflare’s services closer to the users requested them. As part of Cloudflare’s mission, the Guam deployment is a perfect example of how we are going from being the most global network on Earth to the most local one as well.

Submarine cables

There are 486 active submarine cables and 1,306 landings that are currently active or under construction, running to an estimated 1.3 million km around the globe.

A closer look at specific submarine cables landing in Guam show us that the region is actually well served in terms of submarine cables, with several connections to the mainland such as Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Australia, Indonesia and Hawaii, therefore making Guam more resilient to matters such as the one that affected Tonga in January 2022 due to the impact of a volcanic eruption on submarine cables – we wrote about it here.

Cloudflare deployment in Guam
Figure 2: Submarine Cables Landing in Guam (source: submarinecablemap.com)

The picture above also shows the relevance of Guam for other even more remote locations, such as the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) or the Marshall Islands, which have an ‘extra-hop’ to cover when trying to reach the rest of the Internet. Palau also relies on Guam but, from a resilience point of view, has alternatives to locations such as the Philippines or to Australia.

Presence at Mariana Islands Internet Exchange

Cloudflare’s presence in Guam is through Mariana Islands Internet Exchange, or MARIIX, allowing Cloudflare to peer with participants such as:

  • AS 395400 – University of Guam
  • AS 9246 – GTA Teleguam
  • AS 3605 – DoCoMo Pacific
  • AS 7131 – IT&E
  • AS 17456 – PDS

As there are multiple participants, these are being added gradually. The first was AS 7131,  being served from April 2022, and the latest addition is AS 9246, from July 2022.

As some of these ASNs or ASs (autonomous systems — large networks or group of networks) have their own downstream customers, further ASs can leverage Cloudflare’s deployment at Guam, examples being AS 17893 – Palau National Communications Corp – or AS 21996 – Guam Cell.

Therefore, the Cloudflare deployment brings not only a better (and generally faster) Internet to Guam’s residents, but also to residents in nearby archipelagos that are anchored on Guam. In May 2022, according to UN’s forecasts, the covered resident population in the main areas in the region stands around 171k in Guam, 105k in FSM and 60k in the Marshall Islands.

For this deployment, Cloudflare worked with the skilled MARIIX personnel for the physical installations, provisioning and services turn-up. Despite the geographical distance and time zone differences (Hagatna is 9 hours ahead of GMT but only two hours ahead of the Cloudflare office in Singapore, so the time difference wasn’t a big challenge), all the logistics involved and communications went smoothly. A recent blog posted by APNIC, where we can see some personnel with whom Cloudflare worked, reiterates the valuable work being done locally and the increasing importance of Guam in the region.

Performance impact for local/regional habitants

Before Cloudflare’s deployment in Guam, customers of local ASs trying to reach Internet properties via Cloudflare’s network were redirected mainly to Cloudflare’s deployments in Tokyo and Seattle. This is due to the anycast routing used by Cloudflare — as described here; anycast typically routes incoming traffic to the nearest data center. In the case of Guam, and as previously described, these large distances to the nearest locations represents a distance of thousands of kilometers or, in other words, high latency thus affecting user experience badly.

With Cloudflare’s deployment in Guam, Guam’s and nearby archipelagos’ residents are no longer redirected to those faraway locations, instead they are served locally by the new Cloudflare servers. Although a decrease of a few milliseconds may not seem a lot, it actually represents a significant boost in user experience as latency is dramatically reduced. As the total distance between users and servers is reduced, load time is reduced as well. And as users very often quit waiting for a site to load when the load time is high, the opposite occurs as well, i.e., users are more willing to stay within a site if loading times are good. This improvement represents both a better user experience and higher use of the Internet.

In the case of Guam, we use AS 9246 as an example as it was previously served by Seattle but since around 23h00 UTC 14/July/2022 is served by Guam, as illustrated below:

Cloudflare deployment in Guam
Figure 3: Requests per Colo for AS 9246 Before vs After Cloudflare Deployment at Guam.

The following chart displays the median and the 90th percentile of the eyeball TCP RTT for AS 9246 immediately before and after AS 9246 users started to use the Guam deployment:

Cloudflare deployment in Guam
Figure 4: Eyeball TCP RTT for AS 9246 Before vs After Cloudflare Deployment at Guam.

From the chart above we can derive that the overall reduction for the eyeball TCP RTT immediately before and after Guam’s deployment was:

  • Median decreased from 136.3ms to 9.3ms, a 93.2% reduction;
  • P90 decreased from 188.7ms to 97.0ms, a 48.5% reduction.

When comparing the [12h00 ; 13h00] UTC period of the 14/July/2022 (therefore, AS 9246 still served by Seattle) vs the same hour but for the 15th/July/2022 (thus AS9246 already served by Guam), the differences are also clear. We pick this period as this is a busy hour period locally since local time equals UTC plus 10 hours:

Cloudflare deployment in Guam
Figure 5 – Median Eyeball TCP RTT for AS 9246 from Seattle vs Guam.

The median eyeball TCP RTT decreased from 146ms to 12ms, i.e., a massive 91.8% reduction and perhaps, due to already mentioned geographical specificities, one of Cloudflare’s deployments representing a larger reduction in latency for the local end users.

Impact on Internet traffic

We can actually see an increase in HTTP requests in Guam since early April, right when we were setting up our Guam data center. The impact of the deployment was more clear after mid-April, with a further step up in mid-June. Comparing March 8 with July 17, there was an 11.5% increase in requests, as illustrated below:

Cloudflare deployment in Guam
Figure 6: Trend in HTTP Requests per Second in Guam.

Edge Partnership Program

If you’re an ISP that is interested in hosting a Cloudflare cache to improve performance and reduce backhaul, get in touch on our Edge Partnership Program page. And if you’re a software, data, or network engineer – or just the type of person who is curious and wants to help make the Internet better – consider joining our team.

Tomonari Sato: Why I joined Cloudflare and why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in Japan

Post Syndicated from Tomonari Sato original https://blog.cloudflare.com/tomonari-sato-why-i-joined-cloudflare-and-why-im-helping-cloudflare-grow-in-japan/

Tomonari Sato: Why I joined Cloudflare and why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in Japan

This post is also available in 日本語.

Tomonari Sato: Why I joined Cloudflare and why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in Japan

I’m excited to announce that I recently joined Cloudflare in Japan as Vice-President and Managing Director, to help build and expand our customer, partner base, and presence in Japan. Cloudflare expanded its network in Japan in 2010, just months after launching. Now, 12 years later, Cloudflare is continuing its mission to help build a better Internet in Japan and across the globe, and I’m looking forward to being able to contribute to that mission!

Tomonari Sato: Why I joined Cloudflare and why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in Japan

A little about me

In my 35-year career in the IT industry, I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the biggest technology companies in the world, working in various roles in both sales and technical sides of the business. I consider this one of my biggest strengths. In addition, working in the IT industry has allowed me to acquire industry knowledge across a number of different solutions such as custom development, packaged systems (ERP, CRM), MS Office products, and cloud solutions.

Most recently, I was director of the Enterprise Business Group for Japan at AWS, where I was responsible for all commercial industries such as Manufacturing, Process, Distribution, Retail, Telecommunications, Utility, Media, Service, Pharmaceuticals, among others. Prior to AWS, I was Microsoft’s Managing Executive Officer in charge of the Public Sector. In this role, I managed business and strategic relationships with the central government and local government, as well as the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and education industries to help customers accelerate their digital transformation, especially when it comes to their shift to the cloud. In 2005, I joined SAP Japan and spent eight years establishing the partner ecosystem, managing about 250 partners. My last role in SAP was to drive business as a sales leader for three industries (public, utility, and telecommunication). In 1999, I joined IBM to be an initial member of the ERP business unit. At IBM, I got the opportunity to manage large ERP implementations as a Senior Project Manager.

If I look back on my career, I experienced so many things from many dimensions. I started my career as an engineer after I graduated from university. It was the first time I learned what a computer was. I enjoyed my first job as a programmer. I remember how it was a great time for me to learn new things every day since technology was rapidly changing, even in the old days, many, many years ago. I am proud that I have always kept the engineering spirit even after I moved to a sales and management position. After two years as a programmer, I moved to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and spent 12 years as a Systems Engineer. At that time, DEC decided to establish a new manufacturing facility in Japan to provide better quality for Japanese customers. My mission was to design, develop, and maintain all the application systems required to ensure a smooth and seamless manufacturing process, including master production schedule, manufacturing resource planning, inventory, purchasing, work order, shop floor control, and finally developed an automated warehousing system. My last job in DEC was to implement SAP R/3 as a Japan implementation manager. The Japan implementation team was part of the global SAP implementation project, giving me the opportunity to work in a multinational environment. I really enjoyed working at DEC. It was a truly excellent experience for me.

Why Cloudflare

As I look back on my career, one of the things I consider my strength is that throughout those years I got to experience working on technology and computers — as a customer, as a partner, and as a salesperson. Now 35 years later, I’m finally convinced that my role in a global IT company is to contribute to the digital transformation of our customers as well as the society as a whole in Japan, by being able to share global best practices. I decided to join Cloudflare to help accelerate the digital transformation that will help improve Japan’s competitiveness in the world. I believe we have a lot of opportunities to help companies in Japan in this transformation. I remember the feeling I had when I started my first-ever job. I felt a thrill and great motivation. I have the same feeling now with this excellent opportunity for me to launch my new journey with Cloudflare.

Growth opportunities in Japan

It’s often been said that Japan has been slow to adopt digital models, compared to the United States, Europe, and even some countries in Asia. In order to accelerate this digital transformation, the Japanese Government launched a new policy called “Cloud By Default” and subsequently established a Digital Agency in September 2021. There is so much to do, and we are behind. The shift to the cloud has just begun. Businesses are starting to move from on-premise to the cloud, and many organizations are selecting a multi-cloud environment as the next generation platform. Cloudflare has the right solutions, the right people and the right strategy to help Japanese organizations make that shift.

Cloudflare is in a unique position to transform the way we do business by providing security, enhancing the performance of business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual hardware, all within a global cloud platform. Cloudflare’s vast global network, which is one of the fastest on the planet, is trusted by millions of web properties. With direct connections to nearly every service and cloud provider, the Cloudflare network can reach 95% of the world’s population within 50 ms. Cloudflare already has 250 data centers including two Japan sites, Tokyo and Osaka.

Cloudflare is ready to help customers in Japan accelerate their digital transformation and be a trusted solution provider for the Japanese market. I am very much looking forward to contributing to the growth of the business, and the acceleration of the digital transformation for businesses in Japan.

Satyen Desai: Why I joined Cloudflare and why I am helping Cloudflare grow in Southeast Asia and Korea

Post Syndicated from Satyen Desai original https://blog.cloudflare.com/satyen-desai-why-i-joined-cloudflare-and-why-i-am-helping-cloudflare-grow-in-southeast-asia-and-korea/

Satyen Desai: Why I joined Cloudflare and why I am helping Cloudflare grow in Southeast Asia and Korea

Satyen Desai: Why I joined Cloudflare and why I am helping Cloudflare grow in Southeast Asia and Korea

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.

A little about me

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.

My journey to Cloudflare

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.

We’re just getting started…

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 [email protected].

Strength in Diversity: APAC Heritage Month

Post Syndicated from Arwa Ginwala original https://blog.cloudflare.com/strength-in-diversity-apac-heritage-month/

Strength in Diversity: APAC Heritage Month

Strength in Diversity: APAC Heritage Month

In the United States, May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. This year, we wanted to celebrate this occasion in a more inclusive and comprehensive way, which is why we called our celebration APAC Heritage Month. This initiative was a collaboration between Desiflare and Asianflare, Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for employees of Asian descent. We are proud to have run a diverse slate of events and content that we had planned throughout this month of celebration.

Our priority for APAC Heritage Month has been to share the stories and experiences of those in our community: we hosted several different segments to highlight the strong culture and heritage with moderated panels. We also took this opportunity to highlight some of the leaders in the industry of APAC descent around the world, to talk about their journey and struggles, so we can learn from each other and grow to be inspired. Although there has been progress in the past several years regarding representation of APAC stories being told, this small handful of narratives have a hard time representing two thirds of the world. By telling a more diverse set of APAC stories — our own, from immigrants, stories about food, culture and our careers — we hope to bring visibility to our experiences and our existence.

Lending the Microphone to APAC Voices

To keep everyone safe during the pandemic, all of our external events this year have been virtual and televised on Cloudflare TV:

Check out our APAC Heritage month landing page for the recordings of the events that occurred this month. We wanted to celebrate this month and truly embrace the culture and diversity, so please watch the recordings back on Cloudflare TV and beyond. Cloudflare embraces diversity and values diverse teams. We have also taken the recommendations of our teammates and put together a Playlist for you to be inspired by and deep dive into the deep rooted culture and practices we have celebrated this month.

In the spirit of highlighting APAC voices, we also wanted to take this opportunity to share a little about how our Asianflare and Desiflare Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) got started.

How Asianflare started

In March 2020, I (Jade) was having lunch with my colleague Stanley. We were venting to each other about the family of four who had been attacked in a grocery store parking lot in Texas. A few other co-workers joined the conversation, and we got to talk about how it echoed experiences of growing up as a minority in the US with Asian heritage.

That day turned out to be one of the last times we would physically be together in an office.

Stanley and I created Asianflare, the employee resource group for Asian heritage at Cloudflare, when we realized that we needed a space to serve as a support group. Surely, we weren’t the only ones who needed an emotional outlet about current events that impact our demographic. And we had a feeling that things were going to get worse before they got better. In the beginning, we just needed a safe space to just share our experiences with each other. And as lockdowns began across all the offices across the world, the Asianflare community became a real social hub as casual office chatter vanished into the ether.

The community blossomed with every food photo, every music or movie recommendation, every article discussion. We celebrated festivals together, held Zoom Lo Hei (“Prosperity Toss”) in multiple time zones, and held fireside chats on everything from career advice to public policy. Remember when WeChat and TikTok looked like they might be banned in the U.S.? We organized an internal fireside chat with Alissa Starzak, our public policy expert, to answer our questions on what to expect, especially those of us who feared getting cut off from our friends and family. On the average day, though, about 80% of our conversations are about food.

In March 2021, amidst the background radiation of escalating anti-Asian hate, a shooter killed eight people in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian women. What changed this time was the social support structures we had in place. We have a community that can grieve together, just as much as we celebrate together. Our People Team connected us with group therapy sessions offered by one of our benefits providers. At the BEER meeting our CEO, Matthew Prince, not only brought awareness to the issues and what our community was experiencing, but also offered our physical security team’s help. Even when I went outside, the flags were flying at half-mast. Colleagues I hadn’t heard from in ages reached out to make sure we were OK.

I know now that a kid like me growing up today would not see their families’ experiences swept under the rug, because our experiences are a part of the conversation now.

How Desiflare started

At the San Francisco office in 2019, we started to notice a sizable number of both folks of South Asian origin and folks with a deep interest in South Asian culture. So during Diwali (a festival of lights), we decided to have a small lunch get-together. The precursor to Desiflare was thus born in a room with 25 people congregating together for a commemorative vegetarian meal. The success of this small event led to monthly lunch meetings and eventually the formalization of the Desiflare ERG. Given the sizable Desi presence across all of our offices and the expansive interest we’ve seen in Desi culture across Cloudflare, today we see our ERG heavily represented around the world, especially in San Francisco, Austin, NYC, London, and Singapore!

Our Mission is to “Foster a sense of belonging and community amongst Cloudflare employees with an interest in the rich South Asian Culture as a platform to bring people together.”

We welcome everyone who identifies with or is otherwise interested in South Asian culture and look forward to welcoming all into our Desi community! While we are bound by the common fabric of South Asian, we realize that South Asia is vast and varied. Our shared body of culture embraces a breadth of diverse traditions, cuisines, habits, and beliefs, which is only magnified by the variation across the Desi diaspora across the world.

We therefore aspire to embrace and learn about each other to make the Desiflare ERG a place where all feel welcome!

A Year Later: Reflections on the ANZ Security Landscape

Post Syndicated from Raymond Maisano original https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-year-later-reflections-on-the-a-nz-security-landscape/

A Year Later: Reflections on the ANZ Security Landscape

A Year Later: Reflections on the ANZ Security Landscape

It’s been one year since I joined Cloudflare as Head of Australia and New Zealand. While it has been a great year for our ANZ operations, it is hard to stop thinking about the elephant in the room, especially as I’m writing this blog from my home in the middle of Melbourne’s lockdown.

The pandemic has not only disrupted our daily lives, but has also caused a massive shift to remote work for many of us. As a result, security teams lost visibility into office network traffic, their employees moved to unsupervised WiFi networks with new video conferencing technology, and their IT teams found that their out-dated VPN platforms could not handle all the traffic of remote employees. While many organisations were already moving to cloud-based applications, this year has exacerbated the need for greater security posture. Our team has been even more humbled by our mission to help build a better Internet and help organisations face the increased security threats COVID-19 has triggered. With that in mind, I’d like to take a look back at the milestones of the past year.

First, I’d like to recognise how strong and resilient our people have been in the past year. It is not just about the pandemic. It is about a team that has grown more than 60% in size, and for some, have never had the opportunity to meet their colleagues face-to-face, but managed to keep our spirit and culture alive. I’m so proud of how the team continues to meet every customer challenge head on, answering urgent calls for help, many of whom needed to optimise and secure their systems for a remote workforce unprepared for 2020’s curveball.

This is an essential piece in helping to build a better Internet, and the mission is far from over. We recognise the Internet has become an essential service, and greater Internet usage has come with greater cyber risk, and COVID has put the spotlight on the security pain points that Australian organisations and citizens are facing. Scammers have stolen AU$1.2 million from Australians in the first six months of the year, and our recent report ranked Australia fifth in the world for the volume of DDoS attacks targeting Internet properties in Q2.

We need to continue building strong defences against these threats. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison unveiled Australia’s Cyber Security Strategy a few weeks ago, which I had the privilege to consult for. However, we need to go further than this and provide organisations with more than a loose plan for upgrading their security standards.

This is why our mission remains more important than ever, and we are ready to take more on. By the end of 2020 and through 2021, we plan to grow our team significantly to meet the challenges. In the meantime, I believe we need to keep that conversation alive, elevate the message to every board member, and every employee regarding the security risks Australian organisations are facing to really spark a change.

With that said, I am heartened by the increasing number of organisations, large and small, that we have been discussing or working with in the past 12 months. In total, we have had conversations on security with hundreds of organisations over the year, including dozens of meetings on my end with CIOs, CSOs and CISOs, with a very positive response regarding the urgent need for greater security. I have the feeling we are building some kind of community, all rallying behind that common goal.

A few specific examples stand out, as they are perfect illustrations of the variety of problems the team has been able to solve, but also of organisations currently looking for optimisation and security. They are incredibly different, but equally exciting.
The first is Australian tech darling Canva, whose online graphic design tool is used by 20 million people and businesses worldwide. Canva is the perfect example of a business we have helped scale while maintaining performance and security for their users and employees to meet external challenges, including in recent times. Today Canva uses a number of our solutions including Cloudflare Access to secure remote access to internal apps, Workers to customize how user traffic is handled at the network edge, and Bot Management to significantly reduce cyberattacks by image-scraping bots.

“As our business grows, and we expand our product offerings, we’re constantly running into new technical challenges. Just as Canva simplifies graphic design, Cloudflare simplifies performance and security. Thanks to Cloudflare, we can focus on improving our product and expanding into new markets with confidence, knowing that our platform is fast, reliable, and secure.” – Jim Tyrrell, Head of Infrastructure, Canva

The other one is the organisation Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, which is a participant of Cloudflare’s Project Galileo. At Cloudflare, we believe helping to build a better Internet comes with offering more equal access to cybersecurity solutions to vulnerable groups. In 2014, we launched Project Galileo to provide enterprise-level cybersecurity services at no charge to qualified public interest groups like artists, advocates, humanitarian organizations, and the voices of political dissent.

Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef’s purpose is essential: working to protect and conserve the Great Barrier Reef through in-water projects and public engagement. With a strong emphasis on digital innovation and open source data, the organisation relies on its website to engage and mobilise people around the world to join their mission. Through Project Galileo, we’ve helped them to secure their origin server from large bursts of traffic or malicious actors attempting to access the website.

“Under Project Galileo we’re always online – a web-fronted not-for-profit running on the resources of a startup, but with the network confidence of an enterprise.” – Som Meaden, Technologist at Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef

However, there is only so much we can do alone. Because we are stronger together, we continue to establish and reinforce strategic partnerships in the region. In June, we strengthened our relationship with Rackspace to provide our shared users with combined services aimed at securing and optimising their growing online presence. We have also partnered with Baidam and AC3. Finally, even though our coverage in ANZ is already significant, we continue to expand in adding more points of presence in the region.

This first year has certainly been interesting in so many aspects. It has been unexpected and challenging, but also a journey full of learnings I believe have made me a stronger individual and business leader. I work with a team full of talented individuals, customers that share our purpose, and key partners that make us stronger. With all these allies around us, I’m looking at the future full of optimism for our purpose to build a better, safer, and more resilient Internet. Join the cause.