Tag Archives: Impact

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we’re joining the SBTi)

Post Syndicated from Patrick Day original http://blog.cloudflare.com/switching-cloudflare-cut-your-network-carbon-emissions-sbti/

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)

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Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)

Since our founding, Cloudflare has helped customers save on costs, increase security, and boost performance and reliability by migrating legacy hardware functions to the cloud. More recently, our customers have been asking about whether this transition can also improve the environmental impact of their operations.

We are excited to share an independent report published this week that found that switching enterprise network services from on premises devices to Cloudflare services can cut related carbon emissions up to 96%, depending on your current network footprint. The majority of these gains come from consolidating services, which improves carbon efficiency by increasing the utilization of servers that are providing multiple network functions.

And we are not stopping there. Cloudflare is also proud to announce that we have applied to set carbon reduction targets through the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in order to help continue to cut emissions across our operations, facilities, and supply chain.

As we wrap up the hottest summer on record, it's clear that we all have a part to play in understanding and reducing our carbon footprint. Partnering with Cloudflare on your network transformation journey is an easy way to get started. Come join us today!

Traditional vs. cloud-based networking and security

Historically, corporate networks relied on dedicated circuits and specialized hardware to connect and secure their infrastructure. Companies built or rented space in data centers that were physically located within or close to major office locations, and hosted business applications on servers in these data centers. Employees in offices connected to these applications through the local area network (LAN) or over private wide area network (WAN) links from branch locations. A stack of security hardware in each data center, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, DDoS mitigation appliances, VPN concentrators, and more enforced security for all traffic flowing in and out.

This architecture model broke down when applications shifted to the cloud and users left the office, requiring a new approach to connecting and securing corporate networks. Cloudflare’s model, which aligns with the SASE framework, shifts network and security functions from on premises hardware to our distributed global network.

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)
Traditional vs. cloud-based networking and security architecture

This approach improves performance by enforcing policy close to where users are, increases security with Zero Trust principles, and saves costs by delivering functions more efficiently. We are now excited to report that it materially reduces the total power consumption of the services required to connect and secure your organization, which reduces carbon emissions.

Reduced carbon emissions through cloud migration and consolidation

An independent study published this week by Analysys Mason outlines how shifting networking and security functions to the cloud, and particularly consolidating services in a unified platform, directly improves the sustainability of organizations’ network, security, and IT operations. You can read the full study here, but here are a few key points.

The study compared a typical hardware stack deployed in an enterprise data center or IT closet, and its associated energy consumption, to the energy consumption of comparable functions delivered by Cloudflare’s global network. The stack used for comparison included network firewall and WAF, DDoS mitigation, load balancing, WAN optimization, and SD-WAN. Researchers analyzed the average power consumption for devices with differing capacity and found that higher-capacity devices only consume incrementally more energy:

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)
Power consumption across representative networking and security hardware devices with varying traffic capacity

The study noted that specialized hardware is more efficient per watt of electricity consumed at performing specific functions — in other words, a device optimized for intrusion detection will perform intrusion detection functions using less power per request processed than a generic server designed to host multiple different workloads. This can be seen in the bar labeled “impact of cloud processing efficiency” in the graph below.

However, these gains are only relevant when a specialized hardware device is consistently utilized close to its capacity, which most appliances in corporate environments are not. Network, security, and IT teams intentionally provision devices with higher capacity than they will need the majority of the time in order to be able to gracefully handle spikes or peaks.

For example, a security engineer might have traditionally specced a DDoS protection appliance that can handle up to 10 Gbps of traffic in case an attack of that size came in, but the vast majority of the time, the appliance is processing far less traffic (maybe only tens or hundreds of Mbps). This means that it is actually much more efficient for those functions to run on a generic device that is also running other kinds of processes and therefore can operate at a higher baseline utilization, using the same power to get more work done. These benefits are shown in the “utilization gains from cloud” bar in the following graph.

There are also some marginal efficiency gains from other aspects of cloud architecture, such as improved power usage effectiveness (PUE) and carbon intensity of data centers optimized for cloud workloads vs. traditional enterprise infrastructure. These are represented on the right of the graph below.

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)
The analysis shows that processing efficiency in the cloud is lower than specialized on-premises equipment; however, utilization gains through shared cloud services combined with expected PUE and carbon intensity yield potentially 86% emissions savings for large enterprises.  

Researchers compared multiple examples of enterprise IT environments, from small to large traffic volume and complexity, and found that these factors contribute to overall carbon emissions reduction of 78-96% depending on the network analyzed.

One of the most encouraging parts of this study was that it did not include Cloudflare's renewable energy or offset purchases in its findings. A number of studies have concluded that migrating various applications and compute functions from on premises hardware to the cloud can significantly cut carbon emissions. But, those studies also relied in part on carbon accounting benefits like renewable energy or carbon offsets to demonstrate those savings.

Cloudflare also powers its operations with 100% renewable energy and purchases high-quality offsets to account for its annual emissions footprint. Meaning, the emissions savings of potentially switching to Cloudflare are likely even higher than those reported.

Overall, consolidating and migrating to Cloudflare’s services and retiring legacy hardware can substantially reduce energy consumption and emissions. And while you are at it, make sure to consider sustainable end-of-life practices for those retired devices — we will even help you recycle them!

Cloudflare is joining the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)

We're incredibly proud that Cloudflare is helping move the Internet toward a zero emissions future. But, we know that we can do more.

Cloudflare is thrilled to announce that we have submitted our application to join SBTi and set science-based carbon reduction targets across our facilities, operations, and supply chain.

SBTi is one of the world's most ambitious corporate climate action commitments. It requires companies to achieve verifiable emissions reductions across their operations and supply chain without the use of carbon offsets. Companies' short- and long-term reduction goals must be consistent with the Paris Climate Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Once approved, Cloudflare will work over the next 24 months with SBTi to develop and validate our short and long term reduction targets. Stay tuned to our blog and our Impact page for updates as we go.

Cloudflare's commitment to SBTi reduction targets builds on our ongoing commitments to 100% renewable energy, to offset or remove historic carbon emissions associated with powering our network by 2025, and reforestation efforts.

As we have said before, Cloudflare's original goal was not to reduce the Internet's environmental impact. But, that has changed.

Come join Cloudflare today and help us work towards a zero emissions Internet.

Switching to Cloudflare can cut your network carbon emissions up to 96% (and we're joining the SBTi)

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

Post Syndicated from Patrick Day original https://blog.cloudflare.com/35-000-new-trees-in-nova-scotia/

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

Cloudflare is proud to announce the first 35,000 trees from our commitment to help clean up bad bots (and the climate) have been planted.

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

Working with our partners at One Tree Planted (OTP), Cloudflare was able to support the restoration of 20 hectares of land at Victoria Park in Nova Scotia, Canada. The 130-year-old natural woodland park is located in the heart of Truro, NS, and includes over 3,000 acres of hiking and biking trails through natural gorges, rivers, and waterfalls, as well as an old-growth eastern hemlock forest.

The planting projects added red spruce, black spruce, eastern white pine, eastern larch, northern red oak, sugar maple, yellow birch, and jack pine to two areas of the park. The first area was a section of the park that recently lost a number of old conifers due to insect attacks. The second was an area previously used as a municipal dump, which has since been covered by a clay cap and topsoil.

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

Our tree commitment began far from the Canadian woodlands. In 2019, we launched an ambitious tool called Bot Fight Mode, which for the first time fought back against bots, targeting scrapers and other automated actors.

Our idea was simple: preoccupy bad bots with nonsense tasks, so they cannot attack real sites. Even better, make these tasks computationally expensive to engage with. This approach is effective, but it forces bad actors to consume more energy and likely emit more greenhouse gasses (GHG). So in addition to launching Bot Fight Mode, we also committed to supporting tree planting projects to account for any potential environmental impact.

What is Bot Fight Mode?

As soon as Bot Fight Mode is enabled, it immediately starts challenging bots that visit your site. It is available to all Cloudflare customers for free, regardless of plan.

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

When Bot Fight Mode identifies a bot, it issues a computationally expensive challenge to exhaust it (also called “tarpitting”). Our aim is to disincentivize attackers, so they have to find a new hobby altogether. When we tarpit a bot, we require a significant amount of compute time that will stall its progress and result in a hefty server bill. Sorry not sorry.

We do this because bots are leeches. They draw resources, slow down sites, and abuse online platforms. They also hack into accounts and steal personal data. Of course, we allowlist a small number of bots that are well-behaved, like Slack and Google. And Bot Fight Mode only acts on traffic from cloud and hosting providers (because that is where bots usually originate from).

Over 550,000 sites use Bot Fight Mode today! We believe this makes it the most widely deployed bot management solution in the world (though this is impossible to validate). Free customers can enable the tool from the dashboard and paid customers can use a special version, known as Super Bot Fight Mode.

How many trees? Let’s do the math 🚀

Now, the hard part: how can we translate bot challenges into a specific number of trees that should be planted? Fortunately, we can use a series of unit conversions, similar to those we use to calculate Cloudflare’s total GHG emissions.

We started with the following assumptions.

Table 1.

Measure Quantity Scaled Source
Energy used by a standard server 1,760.3 kWh / year To hours (0.2 kWh / hour) Go Climate
Emissions factor 0.33852 kgCO2e / kWh To grams (338.52 gCO2e / kWh) Go Climate
CO2 absorbed by a mature tree 48 lbsCO2e / year To kilograms (21 kgCO2e / year) One Tree Planted

Next, we selected a high-traffic day to model the rate and duration of bot challenges on our network. On May 23, 2021, Bot Fight Mode issued 2,878,622 challenges, which lasted an average of 50 seconds each. In total, bots spent 39,981 hours engaging with our network defenses, or more than four years of challenges in a single day!

We then converted that time value into kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy based on the rate of power consumed by our generic server listed in Table 1 above.

39,981 (hours) x .2 (kWh/hour) = 7,996 (kWh)

Once we knew the total amount of energy consumed by bad bot servers, we used an emissions factor (the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted per unit of energy consumed) to determine total emissions.

7,996 (kwh) x 338.52 (gCO2e/kwh) = 2,706,805 (gCO2e)

If you have made it this far, clearly you like to geek out like we do, so for the sake of completeness, the unit commonly used in emissions calculations is carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), which is a composite unit for all six GHGs listed in the Kyoto Protocol weighted by Global Warming Potential.

The last conversion we needed was from emissions to trees. Our partners at OTP found that a mature tree absorbs roughly 21 kgCO2e per year. Based on our total emissions that translates to roughly 47,000 trees per server, or 840 trees per CPU core. However, in our original post, we also noted that given the time it takes for a newly planted tree to reach maturity, we would multiply our donation by a factor of 25.

In the end, over the first two years of the program, we calculated that we would need approximately 42,000 trees to account for all the individual CPU cores engaged in Bot Fight Mode. For good measure, we rounded up to an even 50,000.

We are proud that most of these trees are already in the ground, and we look forward to providing an update when the final 15,000 are planted.

A piece of the puzzle

“Planting trees will benefit species diversity of the existing forest, animal habitat, greening of reclamation areas as well as community recreation areas, and visual benefits along popular hiking/biking trail networks.”  
– Stephanie Clement, One Tree Planted, Project Manager North America

Reforestation is an important part of protecting healthy ecosystems and promoting biodiversity. Trees and forests are also a fundamental part of helping to slow the growth of global GHG emissions.

However, we recognize there is no single solution to the climate crisis. As part of our mission to help build a better, more sustainable Internet, Cloudflare is investing in renewable energy, tools that help our customers understand and mitigate their own carbon footprints on our network, and projects that will help offset or remove historical emissions associated with powering our network by 2025.

Want to be part of our bots & trees effort? Enable Bot Fight Mode today! It’s available on our free plan and takes only a few seconds. By the time we made our first donation to OTP in 2021, Bot Fight Mode had already spent more than 3,000 years distracting bots.

Help us defeat bad bots and improve our planet today!

35,000 new trees in Nova Scotia

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For more information on Victoria Park, please visit https://www.victoriaparktruro.ca
For more information on One Tree Planted, please visit https://onetreeplanted.org
For more information on sustainability at Cloudflare, please visit www.cloudflare.com/impact

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.

Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%

Post Syndicated from Michelle Zatlyn original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-is-joining-pledge-1/

Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%

Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%

One theme we’ve prioritized this year at Cloudflare is how we can “level up” — level up service to our customers, level up the growth of our network, level up speed and creativity as we innovate.

In addition to our products and business, “leveling up” should also apply to the way Cloudflare gives back. Since our founding, giving back has been part of Cloudflare’s DNA, whether it’s through free services like Unmetered DDoS Mitigation or Universal SSL, giving gifts to the Internet every year during Birthday Week, or through free programs like Project Galileo that helps protect at-risk public interest organizations all over the world: for example, human rights activists and journalists. As the capabilities of our network continue to grow, we know there is more we can do. As we started to plan our first Impact Week, it seemed like the right time to figure out how we can level up how we give back to our communities.

To help us get there, I am excited to announce that Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%. We’re joining the more than 12,000 companies in 100 countries that are committed to making a tangible, positive impact in their communities. As part of Cloudflare’s pledge to give 1%, we’re committing to donate 1% of our products and 1% of our time to give back to our local communities as well as all the communities we support online around the world.

Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%

Pledge 1%

Pledge 1% launched in 2014 with a mission to create a new normal where giving back is integrated into the foundation of companies at all stages of development, from startups to the Fortune 500. As part of the commitment, companies are encouraged to commit to donating to charitable causes one percent of any combination of their products, profits, time or equity.

1% of Product

Part of Cloudflare’s commitment to Pledge 1% will be to grow and expand our donated services programs. Donating free products and services is a part of Cloudflare’s story. We started our company with the basic idea that high-end networking services like security, content delivery, and reliability features should be available for everyone.

In 2014 we launched Project Galileo with the simple idea that we could offer services to journalists and human rights activities around the world for free. Today, Cloudflare protects over 1,500 organizations in 111 countries, and has donated more than $8 million worth of services through that program alone. After the 2016 US election, we launched the Athenian Project to provide state and local governments with our highest level security and reliability services for free, to ensure voters would be able to access election and voter registration information. We now have 292 government entities across 30 states participating in the program, and just yesterday, we announced that the Athenian Project is now available globally.

This week, we also announced our newest program: Project Pangea. Pangea will help community networks for  underserved populations, including those in rural and developing locations, connect to the Internet for free.

We think we are only scratching the surface of how we can leverage one of the world’s fastest, most secure, most reliable networks to help underserved communities access and stay safe online. We’re excited to partner with Pledge 1% and all the great companies that are participating in the movement to help move us forward.

1% of Time

Maybe the most exciting part about Cloudflare joining Pledge 1% is our new commitment to give one percent of our team’s time. To meet that goal, Cloudflare is now offering all employees three days additional annual leave to volunteer in their communities.

Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%

Volunteering is an important part of our culture at Cloudflare. Prior to COVID, our team could dedicate one week every year to local volunteer efforts, which we called Cloudflare Cares. Coordinated across many of our large office locations, we would dedicate each day for a full week volunteering at employee-nominated, local non-profit organizations. Our participation pivoted to virtual during COVID, and it’s been incredible to see the impact one can make in their communities virtually, as well as in person. However, like a lot of folks,  we are excited to return to in-person as soon as we are able to. We are looking forward to leveraging our 1% initiative to take Cloudflare Cares to a higher level of community engagement, around all of our global offices.

Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%

Although 1% of time is a significant investment — we expect this to net out at somewhere in the order of 70,000 hours of Cloudflarian time dedicated to this initiative next year — we think it has the potential to bring our teams closer together, to bring our offices closer to their communities, and attract active and engaged people to come join our team. It’s a big part of our mission to help build a better Internet.

Moving Forward

We’re incredibly proud to be joining Pledge 1%. Their goals are consistent with Cloudflare’s goals, and their methods will help us live up to those values consistently and intentionally. We’ve always been excited to find ways to build products that give back to the world. It is also great to find ways for our team building those products to give back to their communities.

We’re just getting started.