Tag Archives: ESG

Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

Post Syndicated from Patrick Day original https://blog.cloudflare.com/independent-report-shows-moving-to-cloudflare-cuts-your-carbon-footprint/

Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

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Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

In July 2021, Cloudflare described that although we did not start out with the goal to reduce the Internet’s environmental impact, that has changed. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and clearly a better Internet must be sustainable.

As we continue to hunt for efficiencies in every component of our network hardware, every piece of software we write, and every Internet protocol we support, we also want to understand in terms of Internet architecture how moving network security, performance, and reliability functions like those offered by Cloudflare from on-premise solutions to the cloud affects sustainability.

To that end, earlier this year we commissioned a study from the consulting firm Analysys Mason to evaluate the relative carbon efficiency of network functions like firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, content servers, and others that are provided through Cloudflare against similar on-premise solutions.

Although the full report will not be available until next year, we are pleased to share that according to initial findings:

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) “generates up to around 90% less carbon than on-premises appliances at low-medium traffic demand.”

Needless to say, we are excited about the possibilities of these early findings, and look forward to the full report which early indications suggest will show more ways in which moving to Cloudflare will help reduce your infrastructure’s carbon footprint. However, like most things at Cloudflare, we see this as only the beginning.

Fixing the Internet’s energy/emissions problem

The Internet has a number of environmental impacts that need to be addressed, including raw material extraction, water consumption by data centers, and recycling and e-waste, among many others. But, none of those are more urgent than energy and emissions.

According to the United Nations, energy generation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for approximately 35% of global emissions. If you think about all the power needed to run servers, routers, switches, data centers, and Internet exchanges around the world, it’s not surprising that the Boston Consulting Group found that 2% of all carbon output, about 1 billion metric tons per year, is attributable to the Internet.

Conceptually, reducing emissions from energy consumption is relatively straightforward — transition to zero emissions energy sources, and use energy more efficiently in order to speed that transition.  However, practically, applying those concepts to a geographically distributed, disparate networks and systems like the global Internet is infinitely more difficult.

To date, much has been written about improving efficiency or individual pieces of network hardware (like Cloudflare’s deployment of more efficient Arm CPUs) and the power usage efficiency or “PUE” of hyperscale data centers. However, we think there are significant efficiency gains to be made throughout all layers of the network stack, as well as the basic architecture of the Internet itself. We think this study is the first step in investigating those underexplored areas.

How is the study being conducted?

Because the final report is still being written, we’ll have more information about its methodology upon publication. But, here is what we know so far.

To estimate the relative carbon savings of moving enterprise network functions, like those offered by Cloudflare, to the cloud, the Analysys Mason team is evaluating a wide range of enterprise network functions. These include firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, and content servers. For each function they are modeling a variety of scenarios, including usage, different sizes and types of organizations, and different operating conditions.

Information relating to the power and capacity of each on-premise appliance is being sourced from public data sheets from relevant vendors. Information on Cloudflare’s energy consumption is being compiled from internal datasets of total power usage of Cloudflare servers, and the allocation of CPU resources and traffic between different products.

Final report — coming soon!

According to the Analysys Mason team, we should expect the final report sometime in early 2023. Until then, we do want to mention again that the initial WAF results described above may be subject to change as the project continues, and assumptions and methodology are refined. Regardless, we think these are exciting developments and look forward to sharing the full report soon!

Sign up for Cloudflare today!

Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

More bots, more trees

Post Syndicated from Adam Martinetti original https://blog.cloudflare.com/more-bots-more-trees/

More bots, more trees

More bots, more trees

Once a year, we pull data from our Bot Fight Mode to determine the number of trees we can donate to our partners at One Tree Planted. It’s part of the commitment we made in 2019 to deter malicious bots online by redirecting them to a challenge page that requires them to perform computationally intensive, but meaningless tasks. While we use these tasks to drive up the bill for bot operators, we account for the carbon cost by planting trees.

This year when we pulled the numbers, we saw something exciting. While the number of bot detections has gone significantly up, the time bots spend in the Bot Fight Mode challenge page has gone way down. We’ve observed that bot operators are giving up quickly, and moving on to other, unprotected targets. Bot Fight Mode is getting smarter at detecting bots and more efficient at deterring bot operators, and that’s a win for Cloudflare and the environment.

What’s changed?

We’ve seen two changes this year in the Bot Fight Mode results. First, the time attackers spend in Bot Fight Mode challenges has reduced by 166%. Many bot operators are disconnecting almost immediately now from Cloudflare challenge pages. We expect this is because they’ve noticed the sharp cost increase associated with our CPU intensive challenge and given up. Even though we’re seeing individual bot operators give up quickly, Bot Fight Mode is busier than ever. We’re issuing six times more CPU intensive challenges per day compared to last year, thanks to a new detection system written using Cloudflare’s ruleset engine, detailed below.

How did we do this?

When Bot Fight Mode launched, we highlighted one of our core detection systems:

“Handwritten rules for simple bots that, however simple, get used day in, day out.”

Some of them are still very simple. We introduce new simple rules regularly when we detect new software libraries as they start to source a significant amount of traffic. However, we started to reach the limitations of this system. We knew there were sophisticated bots out there that we could identify easily, but they shared enough overlapping traits with good browser traffic that we couldn’t safely deploy new rules to block them safely without potentially impacting our customers’ good traffic as well.

To solve this problem, we built a new rules system written on the same highly performant Ruleset Engine that powers the new WAF, Transform Rules, and Cache Rules, rather than the old Gagarin heuristics engine that was fast but inflexible. This new framework gives us the flexibility we need to write highly complex rules to catch more elusive bots without the risk of interfering with legitimate traffic. The data gathered by these new detections are then labeled and used to train our Machine Learning engine, ensuring we will continue to catch these bots as their operators attempt to adapt.

What’s next?

We’ve heard from Bot Fight Mode customers that they need more flexibility. Website operators now expect a significant percentage of their legitimate traffic to come from automated sources, like service to service APIs. These customers are waiting to enable Bot Fight Mode until they can tell us what parts of their website it can run on safely. In 2023, we will give everyone the ability to write their own flexible Bot Fight Mode rules, so that every Cloudflare customer can join the fight against bots!

Update: Mangroves, Climate Change & economic development

More bots, more trees
Source: One Tree Planted

We’re also pleased to report the second tree planting project from our 2021 bot activity is now complete! Earlier this year, Cloudflare contributed 25,000 trees to a restoration project at Victoria Park in Nova Scotia.

For our second project, we donated 10,000 trees to a much larger restoration project on the eastern shoreline of Kumirmari island in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India. In total, the project included more than 415,000 trees along 7.74 hectares of land in areas that have been degraded or deforested. The types of trees planted included Bain, Avicennia officianalis, Kalo Bain, and eight others.

The Sundarbans are located on the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaptura, and Meghna rivers on the Bay of Bengal, and are home to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests. The forest is not only a UNESCO World Heritage site, but also home to 260 bird species as well as a number of threatened species like the Bengal tiger, the estuarine crocodile, and Indian python. According to One Tree Planted, the Sundarbans are currently under threat from rising sea levels, increasing salinity in the water and soil, cyclonic storms, and flooding.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that mangroves are critical to mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and protecting coastal communities from extreme weather events caused by climate change. The Sundarbans mangrove forest is one of the world’s largest carbon sinks (an area that absorbs more carbon than it emits). One study suggested that coastal mangrove forests sequester carbon at a rate of two to four times that of a mature tropical or subtropical forest region.

One of the most exciting parts of this project was its focus on hiring and empowering local women. According to One Tree Planted, 75 percent of those involved in the project were women, including 85 women employed to monitor and manage the planting site over a five-month period. Participants also received training in the seed collection process with the goal of helping local residents lead mangrove planting from start to finish in the future.

More bots stopped, more trees planted!

Thanks to every Cloudflare customer who’s enabled Bot Fight Mode so far. You’ve helped make the Internet a better place by stopping malicious bots, and you’ve helped make the planet a better place by reforesting the Earth on bot operators’ dime. The more domains that use Bot Fight Mode, the more trees we can plant, so sign up for Cloudflare and activate Bot Fight Mode today!

A Better Internet with UN Global Compact

Post Syndicated from Patrick Day original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-un-global-compact/

A Better Internet with UN Global Compact

A Better Internet with UN Global Compact

Every year during Birthday Week, we talk about what we mean by our mission to help build a better Internet. We release support for new standards and products that help the global Internet community and give things like unmitigated DDoS Protection away for free. We also think about our role as an active participant in the global community of individuals, companies and governments that make the Internet what it is.

In 2020, we decided to formalize our commitment to being an active partner in the global community by joining the UN Global Compact (UNGC) as a signatory. We share the view that achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals set out in the UN Global Compact are the blueprint for a better and more sustainable future. Today, we are proud to release our first Communication on Progress, which describes how we are integrating UNGC principles across our company and as part of helping build a better Internet.

Shared values, economy, and Internet

In 1999, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan shared a sober message with business leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He argued that basic protections like human rights, environmental sustainability, and fair labor practices are not just good for the world or good for business, they are fundamental to the long-term stability of a free and open global market.

Mr. Annan also warned that failure to ensure these basic protections could have dire political and economic consequences. Specifically, if governments, non-governmental organizations, and corporations could not translate the same shared values underlying national markets to the newly-created global market, then the global economy would remain fragile and vulnerable. He described how people feeling victimized would be subject to exploitation, including from “all the ‘isms’ of our post-cold-war world: protectionism; populism; nationalism; ethnic chauvinism; fanaticism; and terrorism,” which prey on misery and insecurity.

More than twenty years later, it’s difficult to find issue with Mr. Annan’s message. In fact, we think that human rights, environmental sustainability, fair labor practices, and anti-corruption are not only fundamental to the global economy, but to building a better Internet as well.

A Global Compact

The UN Global Compact (UNGC) is the world’s largest sustainability initiative with over 14,000 members in 162 countries. The UNGC’s mission is to mobilize companies to align their operations and strategies with UN principles and values.

Participants are required to make three commitments: operating responsibly by adhering to the UN Ten Principles, taking strategic action to help advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and providing annual public reporting on implementation.

The Ten Principles

The UNGC’s first requirement is that companies operate consistent with fundamental responsibilities embodied in the UN Ten Principles, which include human rights, environmental sustainability, labor protections, and anti-corruption. The principles themselves are derived from a series of related UN treaties like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ILO Fundamental Principles on the Rights at Work, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the UN Convention Against Corruption.

Sustainable Development Goals

The UNGC’s second requirement is for participants to help advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs are an urgent call to action for global development that was adopted by all 193 UN member states in 2015. It builds off a number of previous UN development initiatives, including the Earth Summit in 1992, the Millennium Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015, and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Each of the 17 SDGs includes a broad goal combined with specific targets and indicators, as well as progress reports and other metrics.

Cloudflare is committed to helping advance all the 17 UN SDGs. However, like many companies, we’ve focused our efforts and our COP reporting on the SDGs that are most relevant to our business.

SDG 5 is focused on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. This goal is particularly relevant right now, given the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on women in the workforce. We have long believed in the importance of encouraging a diverse workforce, and have benefited from partnerships with returnship programs that provide opportunities to mothers or people who have taken a career break to care for a loved one. This year, we’ve also taken steps to begin reporting on pay equity and have signed multiple diversity charters like the EU Charter and UK Tech Talent Charter. In conjunction with International Women’s Day, Cloudflare also hosted a full month of events and programs designed to foster community and support the growth and advancement of those who identify as women.

By offering free services to protect organizations around the world that empower women from denial for service attacks (DDoS) and other online threats, Cloudflare’s Project Galileo also helps advance the goal of gender equality. Through Project Galileo, we’ve been proud to work with organizations like the Women in Media Initiative Somalia (WIMISOM), which works to empower female journalists in Somalia, as well as serving at the forefront of campaigns to end violence against women, girls, and children.

SDG 13 is focused on taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. Although Cloudflare has always had efficiency at our core, we are also committed to reducing our environmental impact and making the Internet as a whole more environmentally friendly. To reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, Cloudflare has committed to power its network by 100 percent renewable energy, which we achieved in 2020. We are also committed to removing or mitigating all of our historic greenhouse gas emissions associated with powering our network by 2025.

Earlier this year, Cloudflare also released new products to help our customers reach their own climate and emissions goals. For example, Cloudflare is directing computing workload to locations on its edge network that result in better climate outcomes, providing customers with real-time information on their individual emissions footprints, and providing developers with the option to build webpages on infrastructure powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

Moving Forward

As part of announcing what would ultimately become the UNGC, Secretary General Annan noted that the rise of transnational corporations had created unprecedented opportunities for private entities to move humanity forward. As Cloudflare celebrates another Birthday Week, we’re proud to share all the ways we are helping move toward a better Internet. And as always, we’re just getting started.