Tag Archives: asia

Cloudflare is redefining employee well-being in Japan

Post Syndicated from Tomonari Sato original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-is-redefining-employee-well-being-in-japan/

Cloudflare is redefining employee well-being in Japan

This post is also available in 日本語

Cloudflare is redefining employee well-being in Japan

“You can accomplish anything if you do it. Nothing will be accomplished unless you do it. If nothing is not accomplished, that’s because no one did it.“
— Yozan Uesugi

Long hours and hard work. If you ask anyone in Japan what our work culture is like, chances are, these are the words that will come to mind. Different countries have their own cultures and also specific work habits and ways of having a work-life balance. The pandemic brought everyone (companies and their people) a new reality, new lessons, and new habits. Here at Cloudflare, our thinking around where and how we do our best work has evolved over the course of the pandemic. We care about addressing the diverse needs of our workforce and our policies and benefits are designed to optimize for their flexibility and needs. To that end, Cloudflare Japan is making a few important changes to our employee benefits:

  • “take what you need” time off for all our employees
  • 16-week gender-neutral paid parental leave
  • flexible working hours

First, let’s try to understand a bit of the Japanese work culture. According to Japan’s labor laws, Japanese employed workers are assumed to work a maximum of 8 hours a day, or 40 hours per week. But ask any employed person in Japan and you will soon discover that people work much longer hours than that. A 2015 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that about 22% of Japanese employees work 50 hours or more each week on average, well above 11% in the U.S., and 6% in Spain. On top of that, people are also less likely to take personal time off. While existing labor laws provide every employed person with at least 10 days of annual leave (+1 day for every year of service, usually capped at 20 days), a 2017 General Survey on Working Conditions published by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare found that on average, people only actually took 8.8 days of annual leave per year.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and things started to change. With restrictions put in place, a lot of us had no choice but to work from home, a concept that’s completely foreign to the Japanese work culture. And now two years into the pandemic, there has been a shift in the Japanese way of working. In a recent Zero Trust survey that Cloudflare conducted in Japan, 74% of IT and cybersecurity decision makers said their organization will be implementing a combination of return-to-office and work-from-home. This means that the future of work in Japan is flexible.

While we encourage our teams to always get their work across the finish line, we also appreciate the value and importance of having personal time to be able to spend with loved ones, take up a hobby, or simply for rest and relaxation. We believe that time away from work helps you be better at work. Our time away from work policies are designed for that and reflect the reality that technology has enabled us to be more mobile and flexible in the 21st century.

On parental leave, we strongly believe that parents should have equal opportunity to bond with their new family member, and don’t believe in forcing a parent to designate themselves as a “primary” or “secondary” caregiver. We believe these designations create a false dichotomy that does not reflect the modern family, nor reflect our values of diversity and equality; especially when we know that these designations typically disadvantage the careers of women more than men in the workplace.

Lastly, we remain committed to providing great physical spaces for our employees to work, collaborate, and celebrate in, while they’re in the office. While remote work is currently still the norm, it will be up to teams and individuals to decide what works best for them for the task at hand. People may wish to come into our offices to meet with their colleagues, socialize, or join on-site workshops, but then choose to do their quiet focus time work from home. As such, we just completely redesigned and renovated our offices in San Francisco and London —  starting with these offices with experimentation in-mind and with the purpose of reimagining our other global offices. Our way of working has changed, and as such our spaces should support this shift, to be a place where teams can come together and collaborate most effectively.

Cloudflare in Japan: 12 years in and a 100% increase in blocked attacks

Cloudflare has had a longstanding presence in Japan, expanding our network into Tokyo in 2010, just months after launching. Today, we have seven points of presence across four cities, and we also announced our Tokyo office in 2020.

Also, it’s important to mention that in Q4 2021, Cloudflare blocked an average of 1.9 billion attacks per day in Japan. That number has grown to 3.8 billion attacks per day blocked by Cloudflare in Q1 2022, an increase of 100% since the previous quarter.

My goal when I joined Cloudflare almost six months ago remains the same — to help customers in Japan accelerate their digital transformation, that will in turn help improve Japan’s competitiveness in the world. In order to do this, we need to continue to provide a great work environment and build a great team. And we’re just getting started!

We are actively recruiting in Japan and have many open roles across different functions. If you’d like to join us in our mission to help build a better Internet, come talk to us!

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

Post Syndicated from David Belson original https://blog.cloudflare.com/aae-1-smw5-cable-cuts/

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

Just after 1200 UTC on Tuesday, June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables suffered cable cuts. The damage reportedly occurred in Egypt, and impacted Internet connectivity for millions of Internet users across multiple countries in the Middle East and Africa, as well as thousands of miles away in Asia. In addition, Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud reported connectivity issues due to these cable cuts.

The impact

Data from Cloudflare Radar showed significant drops in traffic across the impacted countries as the cable damage occurred, recovering approximately four hours later as the cables were repaired.

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

It appears that Saudi Arabia may have also been affected by the cable cut(s), but the impact was much less significant, and traffic recovered almost immediately.

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

In the graphs above, we show that Ethiopia was one of the impacted countries. However, as it is landlocked, there are obviously no submarine cable landing points within the country. The Afterfibre map from the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) shows that that fiber in Ethiopia connects to fiber in Somalia, which experienced an impact. In addition, Ethio Telecom also routes traffic through network providers in Kenya and Djibouti. Djibouti Telecom, one of these providers, in turn peers with larger global providers like Telecom Italia (TI) Sparkle, which is one of the owners of SMW5.

In addition to impacting end-user connectivity in the impacted countries, the cable cuts also reportedly impacted cloud providers including Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud. In their incident report, Google Cloud noted “Google Cloud Networking experienced increased packet loss for egress traffic from Google to the Middle East, and elevated latency between our Europe and Asia Regions as a result, for 3 hours and 12 minutes, affecting several related products including Cloud NAT, Hybrid Connectivity and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). From preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue was a capacity shortage following two simultaneous fiber-cuts.” OVHcloud noted that “Backbone links between Marseille and Singapore are currently down” and that “Upon further investigation, our Network OPERATION teams advised that the fault was related to our partner fiber cuts.”

When concurrent disruptions like those highlighted above are observed across multiple countries in one or more geographic areas, the culprit is often a submarine cable that connects the impacted countries to the global Internet. The impact of such cable cuts will vary across countries, largely due to the levels of redundancy that they may have in place. That is, are these countries solely dependent on an impacted cable for global Internet connectivity, or do they have redundant connectivity across other submarine or terrestrial cables? Additionally, the location of the country relative to the cable cut will also impact how connectivity in a given country may be affected. Due to these factors, we didn’t see a similar impact across all of the countries connected to the AAE-1 and SMW5 cables.

What happened?

Specific details are sparse, but as noted above, the cable damage reportedly occurred in Egypt – both of the impacted cables land in Abu Talat and Zafarana, which also serve as landing points for a number of other submarine cables. According to a 2021 article in Middle East Eye, “There are 10 cable landing stations on Egypt’s Mediterranean and Red Sea coastlines, and some 15 terrestrial crossing routes across the country.” Alan Mauldin, research director at telecommunications research firm TeleGeography, notes that routing cables between Europe and the Middle East to India is done via Egypt, because there is the least amount of land to cross. This places the country in a unique position as a choke point for international Internet connectivity, with damage to infrastructure locally impacting the ability of millions of people thousands of miles away to access websites and applications, as well as impacting connectivity for leading cloud platform providers.

As the graphs above show, traffic returned to normal levels within a matter of hours, with tweets from telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Oman also noting that Internet services had returned to their countries. Such rapid repairs to submarine cable infrastructure are unusual, as repair timeframes are often measured in days or weeks, as we saw with the cables damaged by the volcanic eruption in Tonga earlier this year. This is due to the need to locate the fault, send repair ships to the appropriate location, and then retrieve the cable and repair it. Given this, the damage to these cables likely occurred on land, after they came ashore.

Keeping content available

By deploying in data centers close to end users, Cloudflare helps to keep traffic local, which can mitigate the impact of catastrophic events like cable cuts, while improving performance, availability, and security. Being able to deliver content from our network generally requires first retrieving it from an origin, and with end users around the world, Cloudflare needs to be able to reach origins from multiple points around the world at the same time. However, a customer origin may be reachable from some networks but not from others, due to a cable cut or some other network disruption.

In September 2021, Cloudflare announced Orpheus, which provides reachability benefits for customers by finding unreachable paths on the Internet in real time, and guiding traffic away from those paths, ensuring that Cloudflare will always be able to reach an origin no matter what is happening on the Internet.

Conclusion

Because the Internet is an interconnected network of networks, an event such as a cable cut can have a ripple effect across the whole Internet, impacting connectivity for users thousands of miles away from where the incident occurred. Users may be unable to access content or applications, or the content/applications may suffer from reduced performance. Additionally, the providers of those applications may experience problems within their own network infrastructure due to such an event.

For network providers, the impact of such events can be mitigated through the use of multiple upstream providers/peers, and diverse physical paths for critical infrastructure like submarine cables. Cloudflare’s globally deployed network can help content and application providers ensure that their content and applications remain available and performant in the face of network disruptions.

Wendy Komadina: No one excited me more than Cloudflare, so I joined.

Post Syndicated from Wendy Komadina original https://blog.cloudflare.com/wendy-komadina-no-one-excited-me-more-than-cloudflare-so-i-joined/

Wendy Komadina:
No one excited me more than Cloudflare, so I joined.

Wendy Komadina:
No one excited me more than Cloudflare, so I joined.

I joined Cloudflare in March to lead Partnerships & Alliances for Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC). In the last month I’ve been asked many times: “Why Cloudflare?” I’ll be honest, I’ve had opportunities to join other technology companies, but no other organization excited me more than Cloudflare. So I jumped. And I couldn’t be more thrilled for the opportunity to build a strong partner ecosystem for APJC.

Wendy Komadina:
No one excited me more than Cloudflare, so I joined.

When I considered joining Cloudflare, I recall consistently reading the message around “Helping to Build a Better Internet”. At first those words didn’t connect with me, but they sounded like an important mission.

I did my research and read analyst reports to learn about Cloudflare’s market position, and then it dawned on me, Cloudflare is leading a transformation. Taking traditional on-premise networking and security hardware and building a transformational cloud-based solution, so customers don’t need to worry about which company supplied their kit. I was excited to learn that Cloudflare customers can simply access the vast global network that has been designed to make everything that customers connect to on the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable. So hasn’t this been done before? For compute and storage that transformation is almost a commodity now, but for networking and security, Cloudflare is leading that transformation and I want to be part of that.

As I continued to learn more about Cloudflare, I connected with the mission of Project Galileo, Cloudflare’s response to cyber attacks launched against important, yet vulnerable groups such as social activists, humanitarian organizations, minority groups and the voices of political dissent, who are repeatedly flooded with malicious cyber attacks in an attempt to take them offline. I was inspired that Cloudflare was part of something beyond a technology transformation. Vulnerable groups and communities who are part of Project Galileo, have access to Cloudflare security services at no cost.

So now that I’m on the inside I shouldn’t be surprised that I continue to find reasons why Cloudflare is the place to work for. Female leadership is well represented, including our President, COO, and co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn, who took the time to meet me during the interview process, and Jen Taylor our Chief Product Officer, whom I met while she was in Sydney meeting customers and partners, gave me a warm welcome.

In my third week in the company, I met a new colleague at a team gathering. We immediately hit it off chatting and getting to know each other. She had built a career in the sports industry which was ripped from under her during the pandemic, where she was one of the many who lost their jobs. What inspired me about her story was how Cloudflare embraced this as an opportunity to bring diverse talent into the company. They opened their virtual arms and doors to offer her an opportunity to build a career. Cloudflare crafted a path that led her into a Business Development role and now into an Associate Solutions Engineer role. Who does that? Cloudflare does, and I’m working with inspiring leaders who are committed to making that happen.

Finally, early in my career I learned the importance of working with Partners. It is important to commit to joint goals, build trust, celebrate success and carry each other through the trenches when things get tough. As a freshly anointed Cloudflare employee, my top priority is to build a strong culture of partnering. Partners are an important extension of our team and through Partners we can provide customers with deeper engagement and expert knowledge on Cloudflare products and services. My initial priority will be to focus on building Zero Trust Partner Practices supporting a significant number of APJC businesses who are planning a Zero Trust strategy, driven by an increase in cyber attacks. This year, we are rolling out sales and technical enablement, in addition to marketing funding to accelerate the ramp up of our Zero Trust partners.

In addition, the team will lean into partnerships who offer professional services and consulting practices that can support customer implementations. Our partners are critical to our joint success, and together we can support customers in their journey through network and security transformation. Finally, I’m excited to share that our co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn will be in Sydney in September for Cloudflare Connect. I look forward to leveraging that platform to share more detail on the APJC Partnerships strategy and launching the APJC Partner Advisory Board.

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].