Tag Archives: Life @ Cloudflare

Building a sustainable workforce, through communities

Post Syndicated from Janet Van Huysse original https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-a-sustainable-workforce-through-communities/

Building a sustainable workforce, through communities

Building a sustainable workforce, through communities

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million Internet properties. This is made possible by our 1,900 team members around the world. We believe the key to achieving our potential is to build diverse teams and create an environment where everyone can do their best work.

That is why we place a lot of value on the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity, equity, and inclusion lead to better outcomes through improved decision-making, more innovative teams, stronger financial returns and simply a better place to work for everyone.

Building a sustainable workforce, through communities

To become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, we believe it’s important to focus on communities within and around our company.

Building internal communities at Cloudflare

At Cloudflare, like most workplaces, there are built-in communities: your direct team, your cross-functional partners and (because we take onboarding very seriously) your new hire class. These communities, especially the first two, are important to help you get your job done. But we want more than that for our team at Cloudflare. We believe that community builds connection and fosters a sense of belonging.

Because of that, we have supported the growth of over 16 Employee Resource Groups (ERG’s). We use the term ERG broadly at Cloudflare. We have many ERG’s focused on traditionally under-represented groups in tech: Afroflare (Black, African diaspora), Latinflare, and Womenflare; groups that have been historically marginalized: Proudflare (LGBTQIA+), Cloudflarents (parents and caregivers); as well as interest and affinity groups like Mindflare and Soberflare. To read more about all of our ERGs, visit our diversity, equity, and inclusion webpage or read about them on our blog. In addition to creating a community of support and belonging, our ERGs also work to enhance career development of their members and contribute to the development of a more inclusive culture at Cloudflare.

Building the skills to build communities

We define an inclusive culture as one where everyone feels safe, welcome and respected with a sense of belonging. We do not leave this to chance. We make investments in training and programs to develop and deepen the skills needed to nurture and preserve inclusive communities at Cloudflare.

One of our earliest offerings was Ally Skills training. The aim of this workshop is to help build awareness of the types of behavior and language which can be harmful to inclusivity at Cloudflare, and teach simple, everyday ways to support people who are targets of systemic oppression. During the workshop, team members share strategies on how to act as allies and how to create a long-lasting, inclusive culture at Cloudflare. As the program was being rolled out, the management team did the workshop together and quickly realized these were not skills reserved for ‘allies’ but it was our expectation that this was how all of our team members treated each other. These were necessary skills to be successful at Cloudflare. As a result, we reworked some pieces of the workshop and renamed it: How We Work Together.

We have also partnered with Paradigm IQ and Included to create a three-part Unconscious Bias Education Program. These workshops are a mix of eLearning and facilitated workshops where we learn about how to help mitigate unconscious bias and make our company a more welcoming and inclusive place for everyone. tEQuitable is an additional comprehensive resource which helps us create a safe, inclusive, and equitable workplace. They provide an independent sounding board where our employees may confidentially raise a concern, access a just-in-time learning platform, and get advice from professional Ombuds. They also help us identify systemic workplace issues and provide us with actionable recommendations for how to improve our workplace culture. What we especially love about tEQuitable is that it’s all about empowering our employees with tools and resources to address issues that may be impacting them, or they may witness impacting others, so we all play an active role in maintaining and nurturing our culture.

One other program worth highlighting is our Week On: Learning and Inclusion. This program came as a response to the murder of George Floyd in the US at the end of May 2020. Our Afroflare global leaders suggested we use Juneteenth as a full-day of deep learning from external experts on topics ranging from the history of race and racism to the psychological impact of racism on people of color. In 2021, we expanded it from a one-day program to a week full of programming with topics ranging from antiracism keynotes, inclusive people management workshops and inclusive recruiting practices.

Holding ourselves accountable to an inclusive culture

Increasing awareness and skill-building is valuable, but it is not enough. We also have to hold ourselves accountable by analyzing data, setting goals and measuring progress objectively. Each year we set company-wide goals around our diversity, and for the last few years we’ve added individual goals for managers — one focused on building a more diverse team, and one focused on building an inclusive team culture.

We also place a high value on behaviors at Cloudflare. This is imperative because we believe that culture is defined by the behaviors we reward. So in order to have a healthy and inclusive culture, we must reward the behaviors that promote and preserve that. We have defined these behaviors as our Cloudflare Capabilities.

Building a sustainable workforce, through communities

We screen for these Capabilities during our interview process, and they are used in performance and promotion conversations. We hold ourselves accountable by using a very simple formula: Performance = results + behaviors. Equally weighted.

Our Recruiting Efforts

Speaking of interviewing, hiring is an important part of our diversity story. We believe that diverse teams win, and we put in a lot of effort to build diverse teams across the company. We have many team members who took unconventional paths into tech, and we believe that makes us stronger as a company. In fact, many of our job descriptions read: We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team.

In addition to an inclusive and expansive mindset around hiring, we also have interviews dedicated specifically to fit against our Capabilities, as well as leveraging technology and tools to help identify great talent who help to increase the diversity of our teams.

We have also made investments in events and partnerships that help support our diversity recruiting efforts. In August 2016, Cloudflare was one of the first companies to partner with Path Forward when it first launched its program in California. [Fun fact: that’s how I learned about Cloudflare and became interested in working here]. In Singapore, we have a similar partnership with Mums@Work.

We also engage with organizations and participate in events that help us reach talent from underrepresented groups. We have sponsored and spoke on stage at events like Lesbians Who Tech and Grace Hopper, where our co-founder, President and COO, Michelle Zatlyn, delivered the keynote in 2020. We regularly attend events and conferences hosted by AfroTech, Women Who Code, Girls Who Code, TAPIA, NSN, and more.

Engaging with external communities

Our ethos is to support and connect with external communities as well. Prior to the pandemic, when our offices were fully open and social and professional events were a thing, we regularly hosted external organizations to host events in our communal spaces. One example of such an organization is Wu Yee Children’s Services, a San Francisco Chinatown-based nonprofit that connects parents and caregivers to affordable childcare options, offers payment assistance to low-income families, and other family and community services. We were honored to host their orientation session. Another organization we hosted was Women Who Code SF. We regularly hosted their “ algorithm and interview prep” workshops, which helped women coders gain the skills they need to land good jobs in the tech industry. Unlike many of our tech company peers, we did not offer free lunch five days a week. It was important to us that our team members got out of the office and supported local businesses and restaurants. It is important that we do not isolate ourselves, but rather are part of a larger community.

We also believe in giving back to our local communities. Prior to COVID, Cloudflare dedicated one week every year to volunteer efforts. 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, but we are anxious to return to in-person giving when we can.

While we are proud of these efforts, it is in using Cloudflare products and services for good that is truly special. Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet means we are in a unique position to help vulnerable websites, applications and services be safer, faster and more reliable online.

A few to highlight:

Project Galileo

Organizations working in the arts, human rights, civil society, journalism, or democracy, may apply for Project Galileo to get Cloudflare’s cybersecurity protection, for free. Since 2014, we’ve been leveraging our services to support vulnerable public interest web properties including, but are not limited to: minority rights organizations, human rights organizations, independent media outlets, arts groups, and democracy and voter protection programs.

Our support of one of these organizations has blossomed over the years. We are proud to announce our partnership with The Trevor Project. Founded in 1998 by the creators of the Academy Award®-winning short film TREVOR, The Trevor Project is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning (LGBTQ) young people under 25. We support the organization through monetary donations, a partnership with our LGBTQIA+ Employee Resource Group, Proudflare, and free Cloudflare services through our Project Galileo Program.

Since 2017, we have donated about $8 million in cybersecurity tools under Project Galileo.

Athenian Project

Cloudflare launched the Athenian Project in 2017 to provide our highest level of cybersecurity services for free to state and local governments in the United States that run elections. The project is designed to protect these websites tied to elections including information related to voting and polling places, voter registration and sites that publish election results. And voter data from cyberattack, and keep them online. During the 2020 U.S. election, we worked closely with civil society and government agencies to share threat information that we saw targeted against these participants and protected more than 292 websites in 30 states, including the Missouri Secretary of State, Solano County in California and The Colorado Department of State.

In recognition that election security is a global issue, we recently announced our partnerships with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute to extend our cybersecurity protections to election management bodies around the world, as well as organizations that support free and fair elections. We look forward to continuing our work to protect resources in the voting process and help build trust in democratic institutions around the world.

Project Fairshot

Around the world, governments, hospitals, and pharmacies are struggling to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine. Technical limitations are causing vaccine registration sites to crash under the load of registrations. At Cloudflare, we want to help. Cloudflare’s Waiting Room feature allows organizations with more demand for a resource — be it concert tickets, new edition sneakers, or vaccines — to allow individuals to queue and then allocate access. Waiting Rooms can be deployed in front of any existing registration website without requiring code changes. As we watched the world struggle to fairly and efficiently distribute the COVID-19 vaccine we wanted to lend our technologies and expertise to help. Under Project Fair Shot, Cloudflare is providing Waiting Room to any government agency, hospital, pharmacy, or other organization facilitating the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine for free until anyone who wants to be vaccinated can be, until at least 31-December 2021.

We all need to work together to get past this incredibly difficult time worldwide and are humbled to have helped so many different organizations around the world such as the County of San Luis Obispo, Verto Health, and the Ministry of Health for the Republic of Latvia, and more!

Why we are publishing our diversity data

At Cloudflare, we believe in being principled, curious and transparent. Publishing our diversity report is aligned with these values.

We are Principled: One of the Cloudflare Capabilities is “Do the Right Thing” — that includes long-term thinking about how we build an innovative and sustainable workforce. We have a fundamental belief that fairness is the right thing. We believe that equity is the right thing.

We are Curious: Creating a more diverse and sustainable workforce is hard work. We want to draw lessons from the things we try, and we want to learn from what others are trying. Sustainable communities is not a zero-sum game, and we believe we can all benefit as an active part of the broader community.

We believe in Transparency: For many years, we have been transparent with our team about our diversity data and our goals, and we have measured our progress regularly. Now we are taking the step to share publicly because we believe in accountability and accept the responsibility to build a diverse and sustainable workforce.

You can check out our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion webpage with our diversity report here.

While there is always more work to be done, we are grateful for the empathetic and curious team that makes Cloudflare what it is today. Together, we are optimistic we can build a better — and more inclusive — Internet.

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Post Syndicated from Andrew Fitch original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-employee-resource-groups-ergs-can-change-an-organization/

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Employee resource groups (ERGs) are important to a company’s success. They foster community and a sense of belonging, help drive organizational change, and improve the overall quality of an organization’s culture. Most importantly, they help organizations become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. I’d love to share the history of ERGs at Cloudflare, as well as how they function and help influence the company.

The history of ERGs at Cloudflare

When I joined Cloudflare in 2017, one of the first things I did was search “LGBTQ” in our company chat. A chat room of a dozen or so employees titled “LGBT at Cloudflare” popped up. There was evidence of some historic chatter in the room, and it was clear some employees had gathered for drinks after work before. I immediately introduced myself to the group, and asked if they would be okay with me setting up a meet & greet event. We booked a conference room, ordered lunch, found an article to discuss, introduced ourselves, and collectively decided we wanted to continue hosting such events. In our second meeting, we decided we should make things official by deciding on a name. This was the birth of Proudflare, our employee resource group (ERG) for LGBTQIA+ employees and our allies, and the first official Cloudflare ERG. I was honored to serve as Proudflare’s first global leader.

Cloudflare employees have founded and advanced fifteen other ERGs since 2017. Afroflare, our ERG for people of the African Diaspora, was the next ERG to form, later in 2017. The most recent is Flarability, our accessibility ERG. All of our groups are focused on fostering community, celebrating diversity, supporting career development, and educating those around us, but serve different communities. We decided early on that if each ERG focuses on education, celebration, and inclusion, we’ll be successful in supporting our underrepresented communities and stimulating positive change at our company. We have come a long way and still have a lot of change to make, but I can safely say that we have definitely helped make Cloudflare more diverse, inclusive, and equitable.

Scroll down to read the mission statements of each of Cloudflare’s ERGs. You may also read more about our ERGs through blog posts they’ve published at Cloudflare.

What is an ERG?

Our definition: At Cloudflare, ERGs are employee-led and company-supported groups of underrepresented and/or marginalized employees or groups of employees who are focused on key Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. These employees join together in the workplace based on shared characteristics, life experiences, or initiatives. ERGs are generally based on creating a community of support and belonging, enhancing career development of their members, and contributing to the development of a more inclusive culture at Cloudflare.

ERGs are led by passionate volunteer employees who serve in roles as global leaders, regional leads, initiative leads, communications leads, and executive advocates. We ERG leaders agreed early on to support each other in our work, so we formed an Inclusion Council. This council is made up of all ERG leaders as well as Cloudflare’s inclusion workshop facilitators and serves as a steering committee in order to surface and incite feedback on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics. We meet monthly, in rotating time zones so we may include leaders from all regions. Some of our most successful ERG partnership initiatives were forged in our Inclusion Council meetings between Womenflare and Afroflare, Asianflare and Desiflare, Mindflare and Proudflare, Latinflare and Afroflare, and more.

Most ERGs leverage executive advocates to help gain support from our senior executives and help those executives become more involved in DEI initiatives. Advocates meet regularly with ERG leaders, review company-wide or external-facing ERG communications, amplify the voices and visibility of ERGs through written communications and participation in events, and advocate for the ERG at the executive level. An example of a successful partnership between an Executive Advocate and an ERG is our CTO, John Graham-Cumming and Womenflare. John has held several meetings with Womenflare members to listen to their needs and experiences, share company decisions, and find ways to better advocate for the women of Cloudflare. He also meets with Womenflare’s leaders biweekly to help with major initiatives and any roadblocks to progress.

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

How do ERGs impact organizations?

The most important function of an ERG is to create a sense of belonging and community amongst their members and allies through chat room conversations and regular connection opportunities. ERGs typically also produce initiatives around global education and celebration opportunities such as Women’s Empowerment Month, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, etc. These initiatives include DEI discussion events, company-wide presentations, company-wide emails, blog posts, social media campaigns, Cloudflare TV segments, publication of antiracism resources, spotlighting of underrepresented and marginalized employees, advising Cloudflare teams on decisions such as inclusive benefits package selection and accessible office space construction, and helping to promote inclusion education programs.

Through these connection opportunities and initiatives, ERGs influence the overall organization. They attract more allies and encourage them to take DEI actions, help educate employees on systemic barriers to DEI, and help make the workplace more inclusive and enjoyable for everyone. I see ERGs as impactful grass-roots movements within a company and I’ve witnessed their positive impact firsthand.

Thank you for reading about Cloudflare’s ERGs. Sixteen ERGs is a good number, but I’m really looking forward to supporting the foundation and growth of even more, and helping our existing ERGs flourish. If you are interested in starting an ERG at your company or learning more about ERG best practices, I encourage you to check out the Human Rights Campaign’s article, Establishing an Employee Resource Group.

Cloudflare ERG mission statements:

Afroflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Our mission is to help build a better Global Afro-community at Cloudflare and beyond. We support each other’s growth, share our community’s stories, and help to make Cloudflare a more diverse and inclusive company.

Asianflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

We provide a supportive environment for all employees of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage, work to create more awareness of the struggles our community has faced and continues to face today, and celebrate our rich shared cultures.

Cloudflarents

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

We provide community and resources for parents and families, and welcome allies, people who are interested in becoming a parent, or who are family-oriented.

Desiflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

We foster networking and build a sense of community amongst Cloudflare employees using the rich South Asian culture as a platform to bring people together.

Flarability

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

We curate and share resources about disabilities, provide a community space for those with disabilities and our allies to find support and thrive, and encourage and guide Cloudflare’s accessibility programs.

Greencloud: Sustainability Group

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Greencloud is a sustainability-focused working group made up of Cloudflare employees who are passionate about the environment and addressing the climate crisis.

Judeoflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

We provide a forum for the Jewish people of Cloudflare where we support each other and celebrate our shared heritage.

Latinflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

The mission of Latinflare is to help create a more diverse workplace, create a sense of community + belonging for Latinx employees, and connect with the communities where we work.

Mindflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

We provide the Cloudflare community resources around mental health, as well as increase awareness and destigmatize mental health more broadly throughout our communities.

Nativeflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

With a shared goal of education, we recognize the heritage and cultural presence of Native American employees at Cloudflare and illuminate the historical impact of policies and racism that continue to fuel prejudice and injustice, even to this day.

Proudflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Our mission is to Educate and Celebrate, Globally! We find ways to support and provide resources for the LGBTQIA+ community and make sure that the Cloudflare community is a welcoming, inclusive place for all.

Soberflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Ensure the Cloudflare community is welcoming and inclusive to those abstaining from alcohol and/or drug use by increasing awareness and destigmatizing the decision to choose sobriety.

Vetflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

We encourage the recruitment and retention of veterans of military service from any military around the world. We also provide a supportive environment and community space for those who have served to network.

Women in Engineering

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Our mission is supporting women’s professional development and success within Cloudflare.

Women in Sales

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Our mission is to provide community experience and resources to help women in our sales organization to grow professionally and support each other collectively.

Womenflare

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Womenflare’s mission is to create a community where all who identify as women feel supported and represented at Cloudflare.

Introducing Greencloud

Post Syndicated from Annika Garbers original https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-greencloud/

Introducing Greencloud

Introducing Greencloud

Over the past few days, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’ve written about the work we’re doing to help build a greener Internet. We’re making bold climate commitments for our own network and facilities and introducing new capabilities that help customers understand and reduce their impact. And in addition to organization-level initiatives, we also recognize the importance of individual impact — which is why we’re excited to publicly introduce Greencloud, our sustainability-focused employee working group.

What is Greencloud?

Greencloud is a coalition of Cloudflare employees who are passionate about the environment. Initially founded in 2019, we’re a cross-functional, global team with a few areas of focus:

  1. Awareness: Greencloud compiles and shares resources about environmental activism with each other and the broader organization. We believe that collective action — not just conscious consumerism, but also engagement in local policy and community movements — is critical to a more sustainable future, and that the ability to affect change starts with education. We’re also consistently inspired by the great work other folks in tech are doing in this space, and love sharing updates from peers that push us to do better within our own spheres of influence.
  2. Support: Our membership includes Cloudflare team members from across the org chart, which enables us to be helpful in supporting multidisciplinary projects led by functional teams within Cloudflare.
  3. Advocacy: We recognize the importance of both individual and organization-level action. We continue to challenge ourselves, each other and the broader organization to think about environmental impact in every decision we make as a company.

Our vision is to contribute on every level to addressing the climate crisis and creating a more sustainable future, helping Cloudflare become a clear leader in sustainable practices among tech companies. Moreover, we want to empower our colleagues to make more sustainable decisions in each of our individual lives.

What has Greencloud done so far?

Since launching in 2019, Greencloud has created a space for conversation and idea generation around Cloudflare’s sustainability initiatives, many of which have been implemented across our organization. As a group, we’ve created content to educate ourselves and external audiences about a broad range of sustainability topics:

  • Benchmarked Cloudflare’s sustainability practices against peer companies to understand our baseline and source ideas for improvement.
  • Curated guides for colleagues on peer-reviewed content, product recommendations, and “low-hanging fruit” actions we all have the ability to take, such as choosing a sustainable 401k investment plan and using a paperless option for all employee documents.
  • Hosted events such as sustainability-themed trivia/quiz nights to spark discussion and teach participants techniques for making more sustainable decisions in our own homes and lives.

In addition to creating “evergreen” resources and hosting events, Greencloud threw a special celebration for April 22, 2021 — the 51st global Earth Day. For the surrounding week, we hosted a series of events to engage our employees and community in sustainability education and actions.

Greencloud TV Takeover

You can catch reruns of our Earth Week content on Cloudflare TV, covering a broad range of topics:

Tuesday: Infrastructure
A chat with Michael Aylward, Head of Cloudflare’s Network Partners Program and renewable energy expert, about the carbon footprint of Internet infrastructure. We explored how the Internet contributes to climate change and what tech companies, including Cloudflare, are doing to minimize this footprint.

Wednesday: Policy
An interview with Doug Kramer, Cloudflare’s General Counsel, and Patrick Day, Cloudflare’s Senior Policy Counsel, on the overlap between sustainability, tech, and public policy. We dove into how tech companies, including Cloudflare, are working with policymakers to build a more sustainable future.

Thursday: Cloudflare and the Climate
Francisco Ponce de León interviewed Sagar Aryal, the CTO of Plant for the Planet, an organization of young Climate Justice Ambassadors with the goal of planting one trillion trees. Plant for the Planet is a participant in Project Galileo, Cloudflare’s program providing free protection for at-risk public interest groups.

In addition, Amy Bibeau, our Greencloud Places team lead, interviewed Cloudflare’s Head Of Real Estate and Workplace Operations, Caroline Quick and LinkedIn’s Dana Jennings, Senior Project Manager, Global Sustainability for a look into the opportunities and challenges around creating sustainable workplaces. Like most companies, Cloudflare is re-thinking what our workplace will look like post-COVID.  Baking sustainability into those plans, and being a model for other companies, can be game changing.

Friday: Personal Impact & Trivia
A panel of Greencloud employees addressed the challenge of personal versus collective/system-level action and broke down some of the highest value actions we’re working on taking in our own lives.

Finally, Greencloud took over Cloudflare TV’s signature game show Silicon Valley Squares with Earth Day-themed questions!

Get engaged

No one person, group, or organization working alone can save our planet — the degree of collective action required to reverse climate change is staggering, but we’re excited and inspired by the work that leaders across every industry are pitching in every day. We’d love for you and/or your organization to join us in this calling to create a more sustainable planet and tell us about your initiatives to exchange ideas.

Why I joined Cloudflare — and why I’m excited about Project Pangea

Post Syndicated from Roderick Fanou original https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-i-joined-cloudflare-and-why-im-excited-about-project-pangea/

Why I joined Cloudflare — and why I’m excited about Project Pangea

Why I joined Cloudflare — and why I’m excited about Project Pangea

If you are well-prepared to take up the challenge, you will get to experience a moment where you are stepping forward to help build a better world. Personally, I felt exactly that when about a month ago, after a long and (COVID) complicated visa process, I joined Cloudflare as a Systems Engineer in Austin, Texas.

In the early 2000s, I experienced while travelling throughout the Benin Republic (my home country) and West Africa more generally, how challenging accessing the Internet was. I recall that, as students, we were often connecting to the web from cybercafés through limited bandwidth purchased at high cost. It was a luxury to have a broadband connection at home. When access was free (say, from high school premises or at university) we still had bandwidth constraints, and often we could not connect for long. The Internet can efficiently help tackle issues encountered (in areas like education, health, communications, …) by populations in similar regions, but the lack of easy and affordable access, made it difficult to leverage. It is in such a context that I chose to pursue my studies in telecoms, with the hope of being able to somehow give back to the community by helping improve Internet access in the region.

My internship at Euphorbia Sarl, a local ISP, introduced me to the process of designing, finding, and deploying suitable technologies to satisfy the interconnection needs for the region. But more than that, it showed me first hand the day-to-day challenges encountered by network operators in Africa. It highlighted the need for more research on the Internet in developing regions, most notably measurements studies, to identify the root causes of the lack of connectivity in the (West) African region.

It was with this experience that I then pursued my doctoral studies at IMDEA Networks Institute and UC3M (Spain) and collaborated with stakeholders and researchers to investigate the characteristics and routing dynamics of the Internet in Africa; and then my postdoc at CAIDA/UCSD (US), looking at the occurrence of network congestion worldwide, and the impact of the SACS cable deployment between Angola and Brazil on Internet routing. While studying the network in those underserved and geographically large regions, we noticed that much of the web content was still served from the US and Europe. We also identified a lack of physical infrastructure and interconnections between local and global networks, alongside a lack of local content, as the root causes of packet-tromboning, high transit costs, and the persistently poor quality of service delivered to the users in the region.

Of course, local communities, network operators, stakeholders, and Internet bodies such as the Internet Society or Packet Clearing House have been working towards bridging this gap. But there is still much room for improvement. I believe this (hopefully soon) post-pandemic era — where more and more activities are shifting online — represents the best opportunity to solve this persistent issue. COVID has forced us to reflect, and one of the critical questions I asked myself was: after so many years of research, how can I — like a frontline doctor or nurse in the pandemic — actively and effectively help mitigate these connectivity issues, creating a better Internet for everyone, notably for those in underserved areas? The answer for me was to switch out of academia into tech. But which company?

As I progressed through the interview process with Cloudflare, it soon became clear that this was the answer to my question above. I discovered that Cloudflare’s values and mission were very much aligned with my own. I also loved the culture, how welcoming and diverse the team is, as well as how attentive and close to us the C-level is. I was impressed by the network footprint and, notably by its spread regardless of the Internet region, especially the growing number of data centers in Latin America and Africa. I had to travel back to West Africa during my visa process, and my experience there only reinforced what I already knew: we need more local content in developing regions, we need more support for local communities, and we need to better enable developing regions.

Fast-forward to my starting date, I was pleased to find out that Cloudflare frequently organizes innovation weeks — like Birthday Week — during which the company gives back to the community. There have been several noteworthy initiatives, including Project Fair Shot to  enable communities to vaccinate fairly, and Project Galileo, protecting at-risk public interest groups.

But what has me truly excited is Project Pangea, which launches today as part of Impact Week. Project Pangea helps improve security and connectivity for community networks at no cost. Cloudflare’s network spans 200+ cities worldwide; it has one of the largest number of interconnects/peers worldwide. It also delivers a state of the art DNS service with privacy in mind, and an intelligent routing system that constantly learns about the best and least congested Internet routes worldwide from and towards any region in the world. My research on Internet performance in developing regions makes me believe that community networks — and their end users — will benefit tremendously from such a partnership. It is so exciting to be part of such an amazing journey, which is why I am sharing my excitement through this post.

I would like to conclude by making an appeal to all stakeholders in developing regions — including network operators, and bodies such as the ISOC and the RIRs. Please do not hesitate to enquire about the Project Pangea. I truly believe that Cloudflare will be a tremendous partner to you, and your network — and your community — will benefit from using them.

Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting

Post Syndicated from Fallon Blossom original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-tv-live-1-000-times-and-counting/

Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting

Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting

Last week, Cloudflare TV celebrated its first anniversary the only way it knows how: with a broadcast brimming with live programming spanning everything from the keynotes of Cloudflare Connect, to a day-long virtual career fair, to our flagship game show Silicon Valley Squares.

When our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince introduced Cloudflare TV to the world last year, he described it as a platform for experimentation. By empowering Cloudflare employees to try whatever they could think up on air — bound only by restraints of common sense — we hoped to unlock aspects of our team’s talent and creativity that otherwise might go untapped in the midst of the pandemic.

The results, as they say, have been extraordinary.

Since launching in June 2020, Cloudflare TV has featured over 1,000 original live episodes covering an incredible array of topics: technical deep dives and tutorials like Hardware at Cloudflare, Leveling up Web Performance with HTTP/3, and Hacker Time. Security expertise from top CISOs and compliance experts. In-depth policy discussions. And of course, updates on Cloudflare’s products with weekly episodes of Latest from Product and Engineering, Estas Semanas en Cloudflare en Español, and launch-day introductions to Magic WAN, Magic Firewall, Cloudflare Pages, and Stream Connect.

We’ve seen a wealth of content that can only be described as inspirational — like Vets at Cloudflare exploring the journeys of military veterans, This is What a Technologist Looks Like showcasing diversity across the industry, and Yes We Can, Cloudflare co-founder, President & COO Michelle Zatlyn’s series debunking the myth that there are no women in tech. Founder Focus has shared the stories of dozens of entrepreneurs, Between Two Clouds delves into the world of customer support, and series like Home Office TV and Cooking With Cloudflare have given an inside look at the personalities (and recipes) that make the Cloudflare community so unique.

All told, Cloudflare TV has featured well over one thousand presenters and their illustrious guests. We’ve been fortunate to welcome the likes of Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom; Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; John Collison, co-founder and President of Stripe; and Jackie Smalls, Chief Programs Officer at Code.org, to name a few.

We’ve also seen amazing contributions from Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Groups — including Latinflare celebrating Cinco De Mayo, Womenflare celebrating Women’s Empowerment Month, Asianflare and Desiflare celebrating APAC Heritage Month, Afroflare celebrating Black History Month (UK & US), Mindflare (supporting mental health awareness), Cloudflare’s sustainability group, Greencloud, and Proudflare, Cloudflare’s LGBTQIA+ group, which is celebrating Pride all month long.

The feedback from fans has been extraordinary. We regularly receive messages from viewers telling us how much they were inspired by a recent guest, or sharing that they leave Cloudflare TV “playing in the background all day.” You can tell they care, because they also let us know that they don’t appreciate when the commercials are louder than the program itself (we’re working on that!)

Perhaps the most meaningful impact of Cloudflare TV has been the way it’s connected the Cloudflare team. Cloudflare is growing quickly, and many team members have never set foot in a Cloudflare office. For anyone who is new to the company, Cloudflare TV has served as a way to get to know their colleagues, and vice versa. Job candidates use it to learn about the teams they aspire to work on. And we all get an excuse to talk to folks beyond the borders of our usual Zoom calls. It is, in a sense, the ultimate virtual water cooler — and the water is spiked with the adrenaline rush of live TV. It’s a potent mix that often leads to declarations of, “that was fun!”

It sure is.

Supporting such a broad array of on-air talent is no small feat, and we have an amazing production team that helps ensure every session goes smoothly (give or take). Many of our Cloudflare TV Producers have roles at Cloudflare that were radically impacted by the pandemic, including our office management and executive admin teams. Few of them had prior TV experience. But that hasn’t kept them from becoming absolutely indispensable.

Before each and every live session — all 1,000+ of them — Cloudflare TV’s producers join our hosts to make sure they have everything they need. They provide crucial technical support, soothe pre-show jitters, and deal with the myriad tiny (and not-so-tiny) emergencies that make live TV so exciting. They are television producers in every sense of the word, and they have helped make this newfangled platform a very human experience, at a time when such things matter.

Also, our engineers are pretty great too. Speaking of which…

Next Season on Cloudflare TV…

Cloudflare TV began as an experiment, and that label still applies. We’re finding creative ways to navigate our own pain points, dogfooding Cloudflare’s newest technologies, and generally trying to take advantage of the fact that this is not well-charted territory. We’ll soon share more technical details on how we run a TV station 24/7, and some of the tools we’re building along the way. Here’s an appetizer.

Our product roadmap includes many of the things you’d expect, like an easier way to find your favorite episodes, and to hear about upcoming new ones. The rainbow bars adorning this blog post will make fewer cameos on the broadcast itself. And just like any good experiment: there will be surprises.

So tune in, geek out — and don’t touch that dial.

Through the eyes of a Cloudflare Technical Support Engineer

Post Syndicated from Justina Wong original https://blog.cloudflare.com/through-the-eyes-tech-support-engineer/

Through the eyes of a Cloudflare Technical Support Engineer

This post originally appeared on Landing Jobs under the title Mission: Protect the Internet where you can find open positions at Cloudflare Lisbon.

Justina Wong, Technical Support Team Lead in Lisbon, talks about what it’s like working at Cloudflare, and everything you need to know if you want to join us.

Through the eyes of a Cloudflare Technical Support Engineer

Justina joined Cloudflare about three years ago in London as a Technical Support Engineer. Currently, she’s part of their Customer Support team working in Lisbon as a team lead.

I can’t speak for others, but I love the things you can learn from the others. There are so many talented individuals who are willing and ready to teach/share. They are my inspiration and I want to become them!

On a Mission to Protect the Internet

Justina’s favourite Cloudflare products are firewall-related ones. The company’s primary care is for the customers and they want to make attack mitigation as easy as possible. As she puts it, “the fact that these protections are on multiple layers, like L7, L3/4, is very important, and I’m proud to be someone who can help our customers when they face certain attacks.”.

Cloudflare is constantly releasing new products to help build a better Internet, so product managers are always on top of tool updates to facilitate that. The company believes that it’s not only important to help customers from the product side, but it’s also as important to teach them how to help themselves so that they can fix their issues promptly without having to wait for an answer.

Company culture and Office vibes

According to Justina, one of the amazing things about Cloudflare is the unified company culture. As their SVP of Engineering, Usman, said in a recent meeting with the team, “Be helpful, look around for problems and help find solutions”.

Every Cloudflare office has its own little “flare”: London’s love of mince pies; Singapore’s super fun cultural richness in one location (they have four new years in one year, officially); and Lisbon’s forever love (and fight) for pastéis de nata.

Each office also has its own function or focus, so people working at Cloudflare get to meet very diverse individuals. For Justina, the things that she’d loved the most are learning from all of the engineers in London, picking up new customer service skills in Singapore and helping to build the new Lisbon office. She says that every time she goes to a different office, they have grown at least 50% in headcount compared to when she was last there. Talk about growth!

As a hiring manager, she also says that the company is mindful of diversity.

Through the eyes of a Cloudflare Technical Support Engineer

Working remote

Like everywhere else, remote work has become the current normal at Cloudflare. As someone who enjoyed being in the office, Justina says “all the countless times I just walked over to someone to ask a question, now all turned into a chat message; or the random coffee chat when we waited for our coffee to be done.”

Funnily enough, the EMEA CSUP team is working closer than before the pandemic. Previously, each office was somewhat in its own communication bubble, now it has turned into a collective conversation. This is great for getting to know colleagues during and beyond work hours.

What you need to know if you want to land a job at Cloudflare in Lisbon

For Cloudflare, growing the team is a continuous challenge, and Justina has never needed to do as many interviews as she has done in the Lisbon office. Although it’s a huge challenge for her, it’s also fun. Since the company is hiring aggressively despite the pandemic, their teams are eager to welcome anyone who’s ready to be part of Lisbon Cloudflare.

One of the things you can expect if you work at Cloudflare is for your manager to care and for your feedback to be heard. We know these are valuable things when considering where to work. So if you’re someone who’s willing to learn and is excited about their technologies, this call is for you. The company is expanding in different markets, so they’re looking for tech candidates who can speak multiple languages.

Currently, Cloudflare has over 25 open positions for their offices in Lisbon. Categories include Security Engineers, Full-Stack Developers, Data Scientists, and more.

Cloudflare Named a ‘Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality’

Post Syndicated from Chase Robinson original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-named-a-best-place-to-work-for-lgbtq-equality/

Cloudflare Named a ‘Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality’

Cloudflare Named a ‘Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality’

Today we are excited to announce Cloudflare has been named a “Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality” by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). This designation was earned by receiving a perfect score of 100 percent on the HRC’s 2021 Corporate Equality Index. The Corporate Equality Index (CEI) is a nationally recognized benchmarking tool that assesses the inclusivity of corporate policies, practices, and benefits for LGBTQIA+ employees.

Cloudflare’s mission is to “help build a better Internet”. An essential factor that helps us deliver on this mission is our people. When you are solving some of the toughest problems facing the Internet for users worldwide, you need talented individuals that contribute unique outlooks. We strive to build a workplace where our entire team feels comfortable and excited to bring their true authentic selves so they can do their best work.

2021 is the first year Cloudflare has been listed on the Index, but we have been paving this path for quite some time. Back in 2017 a few Cloudflare employees chartered Proudflare, Cloudflare’s first-ever Employee Resource Group (ERG). Proudflare serves as a community space for LGBTQIA+ employees and allies. Check out our Proudflare Launch blog to learn more on that process! Proudflare hosts educational events, celebrates LGBTQIA+ folks, and advocates for equality in the workplace and beyond. In 2019, right around the same time Cloudflare surpassed 500 full-time US-based employees, a requirement to be included in the CEI, a group of members took a look at how equitably LGBTQIA+ folks are represented in our policies, practices, and benefits.

As we set our sights on the CEI, it wasn’t enough for us to be included. In typical Cloudflare fashion, we set a lofty goal. If we were going to be listed we would hold ourselves accountable for being a truly inclusive workplace and receive the best score, of 100. This goal forced us to be diligent, proactive, and thoughtful. We organized a team of individuals across Proudflare, the Benefits, Legal, Facilities, Recruiting, and People teams, which led to the creation of some incredible new resources for employees.

The CEI ranking takes into account workforce protections (for sexual orientation and gender identity), inclusive benefits (equivalency for same and different sex spouses and domestic partners, and equal health coverage for transgender individuals) and specific guidelines around internal training for new hires and managers (that cover nondiscrimination, gender identity, sexual orientation) and best practices (such as gender transition guidelines) as well as efforts to recruit and reach out to the wider LGBTQIA+ community. The full report is here and includes details of everything that went into achieving the perfect 100 score.

Looking ahead, we will strive to maintain this score and continue to challenge ourselves to make Cloudflare an ever more inclusive place to work.

Starting a new job in the middle of a pandemic

Post Syndicated from Daniela Rodrigues original https://blog.cloudflare.com/starting-a-new-job-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/

Starting a new job in the middle of a pandemic

Starting a new job in the middle of a pandemic

It has now been more than 90 days since I joined Cloudflare’s EMEA Recruiting Team as a Recruiting Coordinator based in Lisbon. In a year filled with hardships for so many people around the world, I wanted to share my journey. I hope people will relate and feel encouraged to pursue their dreams, even during these challenging times.

When 2020 started, it was not in my plans to change jobs and start working at a new company, completely remote, without ever meeting my colleagues in person or visiting the office. However, that is exactly what happened, and I am so glad I did.

Interviewing with Cloudflare

The number of interviews in the hiring process at Cloudflare may feel overwhelming for some – in my case, I met 11 people during this process. For me, I was glad to have so many chances to get to know the people I would be working with. I believe I got as much out of the conversations as the interviewers did, which is great — a recruitment process should be as much about the company getting to know you, as you getting to know the company.

A great thing about interviewing remotely is that I got the chance to talk to people all around the globe, which enriched the process and my idea of Cloudflare as a company. I started to picture myself as an actual member of the team, definitely interested in working towards a better and safer Internet. Even though there were many interviews to get through, the constant communication with the team made me feel engaged and excited. In the end, the process went by quickly, even quicker than I expected.

The best thing was the outpouring of support I received from what would be my future teammates once I accepted the offer. I felt welcomed way before my actual start date!

Remote Onboarding: Adapting and Evolving

In all my previous companies, onboarding was done in person and small groups. I was not prepared for a fully remote experience with a class of more than 20 people, yet it was so smooth and well-coordinated that you wouldn’t believe it had been run virtually for only a few months!

My onboarding class included people from all over the world — Lisbon, Austin, Miami, Washington, London, Munich, Singapore… And not only that, but we were all starting different roles, from Customer Success to Engineering, and even Legal Counsel! This gave me the opportunity to know people I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to meet, and it allowed me to establish bonds early on with my colleagues. Given the current situation, knowing that people were in the same boat with me felt reassuring. I felt that we were in it together, in a way. Not only that, but I got everything I needed for work (and more — like a pair of Cloudflare socks!) delivered to my home, making the whole experience very comfortable for me.

Ramping up and aiming for the stars

Starting a new job in the middle of a pandemic

Starting in a new role can be a daunting experience — it’s a new environment, a new team, a new project, and lots of things that could go sideways. However, there are also a lot of things that can go right!

At Cloudflare, I found an extremely welcoming, supportive team that helped me ramp up and take ownership of my work quickly and effectively. I felt so supported that I took ownership of a big project right away — Cloudflare Careers Day. Right from the start, it was clear to me that Cloudflare has ambitious goals for the growth of our Lisbon office. I thought about the ways I could help with that, and a virtual careers day seemed like a great first step to drive brand awareness and let people know we are hiring and that we are hiring! The Recruitment Team set in motion a plan to turn this idea into reality in less than three months, resulting in a successful and fun first edition of the Cloudflare Careers Day in November 2020.

Of course, there were times when I felt unsure of myself and my abilities. But this is why it is so important to be able to rely on your team. In the end, I feel I have grown a lot in just three months — not only professionally, but personally as well!

I look forward to working on more projects. I’m excited to write with this blog post, which I hope will inspire more people to take a chance, believe in themselves and just go for it! Even in these strange, stressful times, good things can and do happen, especially when you are surrounded by talented, inspiring people.

What does the future hold?

Lisbon! I am excited to help grow our Lisbon office, recruiting talented people that feel as strongly as I do about helping build a better Internet. We have many different open roles at the moment so, if you see one that suits you, take a chance and reach out. Maybe you’ll embark on a new journey, just like me.

Our Lisbon story is just beginning. I can’t wait to see all the amazing things we will accomplish in 2021, both as a team and as a company.

Holiday Season Update from Lisbon

Post Syndicated from Celso Martinho original https://blog.cloudflare.com/holiday-season-update-from-lisbon/

Holiday Season Update from Lisbon

Holiday Season Update from Lisbon

It’s the end of the year, so we thought it would be a great time to give you an update on how we’re doing and what we’re planning for 2021. If you’re reading this, you know we like to share everything we do at Cloudflare, including how the organization is evolving.

In July, John Graham-Cumming wrote a blog post entitled Cloudflare’s first year in Lisbon. and showed how we went from an announcement, just a few months before, to an entirely bootstrapped and fully functional office. At the time, despite a ramping pandemic, the team was already hard at work doing a fantastic job scaling up and solidifying our presence here.

A few weeks later, in August, I proudly joined the team.

The first weeks

Cloudflare is, by any standard, a big company. There’s a lot you need to learn, many people you need to get to know first, and a lot of setup steps you need to get through before you’re in a position to do actual real productive work.

Joining the company during COVID was challenging. I felt just as excited as I was scared. We were (and still are) fully working from home, I didn’t have a team to work with in person. A setup like this surely looks daunting, even for experienced people.

But here’s the thing. Cloudflare isn’t just any company. We’re unparalleled because we masterfully combine scale, ambition, talent, product, vision, values, and culture in a way that’s very difficult to replicate and maintain at any other company.

We’re big, but we move fast. We’re over 1,600 working together, but it feels like a cohesive group. We’re distributed across multiple offices and continents, often working in teams with members from different time zones, but we don’t notice it. We have tools, documentation, and methodologies, but they don’t get in the way of our “shipping products” mantra. There are product owners, teams for specific features, but we all hold ownership for everyone’s work.

I felt all of this right after my orientation week. The warm welcome, the regular check-ins to say hello and see how I was doing, and everyone’s urge to make sure I was adjusting and getting all the help I needed, giving me advice, introducing me to other colleagues. Cloudflarians take genuine pride in making sure everyone feels at home. You can learn more about this experience from a Story Time segment John did with me.

Where do we stand

Cloudflare Lisbon has come a long way. We now have 74 incredibly talented people working or joining in areas such as Engineering, Security, Infrastructure, Customer Support, People, Places, Product Management, Emerging Technologies or Accounting, and growing fast.

Although the pandemic didn’t help our plans, especially those related to growing and physically working in our brand new office on Praça Marquês de Pombal, it didn’t slow us down either. November and December alone, 15 people joined the team. We’re gaining momentum.

More interestingly, we have a super diverse team in Lisbon, and we couldn’t be prouder of it. We’re putting action ahead of words and actively contributing to create more opportunities for women in technology and to attract people to work in Portugal regardless of their country of origin.

Our discussions on whether “Pastéis de Nata” is best served with or without cinnamon, our holiday traditions, Portuguese music, coffee, our frequent virtual Pub Quizzes, escape room events, and of course, the comments on shirtless Marcelo are now routine. They are evidence that we feel like a group working together, having fun while growing.

Returning to Portugal?

We live in unusual and contemplative times. Many of our emigrants living outside the country are considering returning home to Portugal and our office in Lisbon is proof of this growing movement. Portuguese returnees represent roughly 10% of our team.

The Portuguese Government has an initiative called “Programa Regressar,” where they provide tax benefits and financial assistance to support emigrants and their families returning to Portugal.

While this is great, we think it’s not enough. Moving you and your family to another country is a life-changing event. Although things like patriotism, cost of living, and tax incentives play an essential role in the personal decision process, skilled and talented people will also be looking for a great workplace and a meaningful, ambitious company to join.

This is where Cloudflare can help you. We can provide you the best of the two worlds. Living in a beautiful country, your home, while working in a world-class company, solving big problems at scale on a mission to help build a better Internet with a unique culture. Furthermore, we support your return, and we’re ready to help you in any way we can.

The future

Cloudflare is serious about its presence in Portugal. We’re going to continue growing and investing in highly skilled talent for our Lisbon office and making it one of Cloudflare’s top locations, alongside San Francisco, Austin, Singapore, and London.

Currently, we have 28 open positions in Lisbon, and you can expect new ones to open over the upcoming weeks. Some are for teams based in Lisbon, like Data Insights and Cloudflare Radar (we’re doubling in 2021), while others will join different projects, some of which have teams distributed across multiple offices.

If you decide to apply, there are many resources you can use to learn about Cloudflare and improve your chances of snatching your dream job. Here are a few:

  • Cloudflare Careers Day: Meet the Engineering Team with Isabel Rodrigues, Jen Langdon, and me.
  • Our Blog. We share an unusual amount of information about our infrastructure and products, our technical decisions, architecture, and our approach to solving complex, large-scale technical challenges.
  • Our Official Github Page. We have open-source encoded all over in our DNA, and we like to give back to the community whenever possible. Cloudflare has over 300 public projects that you can explore, try them yourself, or fork.
  • Our Developers Website, where you can learn about our products, the way they work, their features, and APIs. Speaking of APIs, take a look at cloudflare-go and flarectl.
  • Check our community Forum, ask us questions; we’re always there for you, you’ll be surprised. Follow us on Twitter.
  • Cloudflare TV airs excellent content all the time. You can check our schedule for numerous live segments with the team and guests or re-run past segments. We also have a “Best of” archive.
  • Finally, you can try our products. As part of our mission and values, we offer very generous free tiers to individual users and small startups. You can try our CDN features, DDoS, Workers (100,000 requests per day, with Workers KV included), and even Access for Teams (with Argo tunnel included, for companies or households under 50 seats), at no cost.

We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet. Cloudflare powers Internet requests for ~16% of the Fortune 1,000 and serves 20 million HTTP requests per second on average.

UK Black History Month at Cloudflare

Post Syndicated from Chad Toerien original https://blog.cloudflare.com/black-history-month-2020-in-the-uk-at-cloudflare/

UK Black History Month at Cloudflare

UK Black History Month at Cloudflare

In February 2019, I started my journey at Cloudflare. Back then, we lived in a COVID-19 free world and I was lucky enough, as part of the employee onboarding program, to visit our San Francisco HQ. As I took my first steps into the office, I was greeted by a beautiful bouquet of Protea flowers at the reception desk. Being from South Africa, seeing our national flower instantly made me feel at home and welcomed to the Cloudflare family – this memory will always be with me.

Later that day, I learnt it was Black History Month in the US. This celebration included African food for lunch, highlights of Black History icons on Cloudflare’s TV screens, and African drummers. At Cloudflare, Black History Month is coordinated and run by Afroflare, one of many Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that celebrates diversity and inclusion. The excellent delivery of Black History Month demonstrated to me how seriously Cloudflare takes Black History Month and ERGs.

Today, I am one of the Afroflare leads in the London office and led this year’s UK Black History Month celebration. 2020 has been a year of historical events, which made this celebration uniquely significant. George Floyd’s murder in the US increased the awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement across the world. The Nigerian #EndSARS movement against police brutality made global headlines and resulted in cyber attacks. The election of US Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris, the first female, African-American, and Asian-American to hold that position.

With the above mentioned, our approach during UK Black History Month was to celebrate the Past, Present, and Future of Black History. The past triumphs, as well as the contributions of people that are of African and Caribbean heritage, were celebrated through social media posts and internal emails, which documented their stories. Black History that is being made every day in the present was highlighted in fireside chats and interviews on Cloudflare TV for everyone to watch – at Cloudflare and the rest of the world. Finally, we wanted to take a look at the Future of rising stars and their actions that would make history by the strides taken today.

To showcase the incredible talent that we have at Cloudflare and highlight present contributions, we hosted knowledge share sessions delivered by experts in Business Development (Stephen Thompson), Customer Development (Jay Henderson), and Customer Success Management (Warren Rickards). All these talks are available as recordings on Cloudflare TV, and we encourage that you give them a watch!

We also had the honour of hosting phenomenal speakers through fireside chats on Cloudflare TV. These individuals are creating a positive impact in their communities today and are shaping the future of technology in Africa. My first chat was with Lungisa Matshoba, the CTO and Founder of Yoco, a payments company in South Africa that makes it easier for small businesses to accept payments and is positively impacting the South African economy.

Next, I spoke with Thando Tetty, the Head of Engineering at Investec UK, who shared stories from his career and the journey of immigrating from Eswatini to South Africa, then to the UK.  Finally, Cloudflare’s CSO and Afroflare’s Executive Advocate, Joe Sullivan, interviewed Ayotunde Coker, Managing Director at Rack Centre in Nigeria, who shared insights on the state of the Internet in Africa and spoke about African innovations contributing to technology at large.

By leveraging Cloudflare’s infrastructure and using services like Cloudflare for Teams and Cloudflare TV, we were able to celebrate Black History Month UK for the first time as a company and remotely.

Coming from South Africa, where Black History Month doesn’t exist because Black History is made every day, it was crucial to surface these contributions and look beyond a single month, with the message of hope and by asking how we can celebrate Black History every day.

We aim to leave a legacy of hope and improve diversity and inclusion by believing that anything can be possible when you believe in yourself. In the words of the great Nelson Mandela,

“Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.” — London’s Trafalgar Square in 2005.

Bienvenue Cloudflare France! Why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in France

Post Syndicated from Boris Lecoeur original https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-im-helping-cloudflare-grow-in-france/

Bienvenue Cloudflare France! Why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in France

If you’d like to read this post in French click here.

Bienvenue Cloudflare France! Why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in France

I am incredibly excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as its Head of France to help build a better Internet and expand the company’s growing customer base in France. This is an important milestone for Cloudflare as we continue to grow our presence in Europe. Alongside our London, Munich, and Lisbon offices, Paris marks the fourth Cloudflare office in the EMEA region. With this, we’ll be able to further serve our customers’ demand, recruit local talent, and build on the successes we’ve had in our other offices around the globe. I have been impressed by what Cloudflare has built in EMEA including France, and I am even more excited by what lies ahead for our customers, partners, and employees.

Born in Paris and raised in Paris, Normandie and Germany, I started my career more than 20 years ago. While a teenager, I had the chance to work on one of the first Apple IIe’s available in France. I have always had a passion for technology and continue to be amazed by the value of its adoption with businesses large and small. In former roles as Solution Engineer to Account Manager, Partner Director to Sales Director, and more recently Country Manager—I’ve had the chance to manage different sizes of businesses and teams, and am passionate about seeking out and providing the best solutions and value to customers and their challenging yet unique needs.

In 2011, I opened the Amazon Web Services office in France. Over the last nine years, I have advised and helped a large number of companies, across varying industries and sizes, move from on-premise infrastructure to cloud and SaaS architectures. I have seen that this major and inevitable transition has increased, exponentially, the complexity of architecture with heterogeneous infrastructure environments across public cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments. The threat landscape, functional requirements, and scale of business applications have evolved faster than ever before, and the volume and sophistication of network attacks can strain the defensive capabilities of even the most advanced enterprises. This is forcing a major architectural shift in how enterprises address security, performance, and reliability at the network layer.

Today, companies’ digital assets (web properties, applications, APIs, and on) have become their most valuable asset. How organizations are able to use the Internet to serve their customers, partners, and employees—is now a strategic priority for organizations around the world. Cloudflare is leading this transition.

Why Cloudflare?

Here are four reasons why I’m joining and embarking on this amazing journey.

  • Cloudflare’s customer base and growth: I have been impressed with the growth, technology, and pace of adoption behind the company’s suite of products. Cloudflare is servicing Internet properties of more than 3.2 million customers that are relying on us around the world, including approximately 16 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies. From the public sector to enterprises to startups—companies of all sizes and types are being powered by these critical security, performance, and reliability services. Every day thousands of new customers sign up for Cloudflare services.
  • Cloudflare’s Global Network: I discovered early on that Cloudflare is powered by its global network that is always learning and growing. This means, as companies grow and expand, Cloudflare will be able to help them scale and support their growth. This network spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. With more than 1 billion unique IP addresses passing through it every day, it works as an immune system continuously learning and adapting to new threats, as well as optimizing itself which benefits all of Cloudflare customers and users worldwide. Cloudflare’s network operates within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the Internet-connected population in the developed world (for context, the blink of an eye is 300-400 milliseconds!). What’s more, this network blocked on average 76 billion cyber threats each day last quarter.
  • Cloudflare’s technology and pace of innovation: At Cloudflare, the pace of innovation has stunned me. Leveraging its unique global network, the company is continuously releasing new products and features in the cloud that are available at a massive scale—worldwide to its customers and users. I discovered some products which are disrupting traditional IT approaches. To name a few: Cloudflare One, a platform to connect and secure companies and teams anywhere (remote and across offices) and on any device; Cloudflare Workers, a serverless solution redefining how applications are deployed at the network edge; Magic Transit, which delivers the power of Cloudflare services for your on-premise, cloud-hosted, and hybrid networks; Argo Smart Routing which acts as Waze for the Internet, can significantly cut the amount of time users online spend waiting for content; and Cloudflare Web Analytics, a privacy-first solution to give marketers and web creators the information they need in a simple, clean way that doesn’t sacrifice visitor privacy.
  • The company’s culture. During the interview process, I had the chance to meet many Cloudflare employees including some of the leadership team. I met a very diverse team of incredibly smart, curious, kind, and committed people. I was impressed by the builder mindset in all of the people I talked to, and all are truly passionate about the Cloudflare mission. I also loved the culture of openness, collaboration, and transparency—which aligns with the values I have embraced since I started my career. This wider Cloudflare mission has resonated with me: to help build a better Internet. In doing this, we provide organizations with powerful technologies that, previously, could only be used by those that could afford those large expenses and complexities to implement and maintain.

Cloudflare in France

In France, you can find a vibrant startup ecosystem, large enterprises, and a very active SMB business environment. Cloudflare has had customers in France from the very early days and today we have thousands of French customers spanning the country from not only startups, to SMBs and enterprises, but also government, education, and non-profit organizations. More than 25 percent of the CAC 40 are using Cloudflare services. Major French enterprises such as L’Oréal, Solocal, Criteo, Allianz France, DPD Group (le Groupe LaPoste), and more are protecting and accelerating their Internet properties with Cloudflare services. In addition, more than 30 percent of the Next40 are equipped with Cloudflare’s Internet security, performance, and reliability solutions—such as Back Market, Happn, Wildmoka, and SendinBlue. We take pride in being relied on by these organizations and are eager to help more French companies grow.

Bienvenue Cloudflare France! Why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in France

Looking ahead

Since the beginning of the year, the rise in remote work, cyber threats, and stress on online assets has generated an even greater need to provide secure, fast, and reliable Internet services. This goes for employees, customers, and partners—of any organization. As a result, this demand has never been so critical. We’re here to work with all types of customers. If you are a business, a public sector organisation, an NGO—or anyone that has cybersecurity, performance, or reliability challenges or questions—get in touch with us. We’d love to explore how we can help. If you are a system integrator, consulting company, MSP, and so on—let’s explore a partnership on how we may be able to help you accelerate your business.

If you are interested in joining Cloudflare and helping to build a more secure, fast, and reliable Internet—please explore our open positions and select Paris, France as the location. We are hiring talented people locally and globally, now building our initial team of Account Executives, Channel Managers, Business Development Representatives, Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers, and more—to further serve our current customers and grow with more organizations in France.
It is a great honour for me to be part of the Cloudflare family, to help build Cloudflare’s future in France, and help French organizations grow. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

Post Syndicated from Selina Cho original https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-virtual-product-management-internship-experience/

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

In July 2020, I joined Cloudflare as a Product Management Intern on the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) team to enhance the benefits that Network Analytics brings to our customers. In the following, I am excited to share with you my experience with remote working as an intern, and how I acclimatized into Cloudflare. I also give details about what my work entailed and how we approached the process of Product Management.

Onboarding to Cloudflare during COVID19

As a long-time user of Cloudflare’s Free CDN plan myself, I was thrilled to join the company and learn what was happening behind the scenes while making its products. The entering internship class consisted of students and recent graduates from various backgrounds around the world – all with a mutual passion in helping build a better Internet.

The catch here was that 2020 would make the experience of being an intern very different. As it was the case with many other fellow interns, it was the first time I had taken up work remotely from scratch. The initial challenge was to integrate into the working environment without ever meeting colleagues in a physical office. Because everything took place online, it was much harder to pick up non-verbal cues that play a key role in communication, such as eye contact and body language.

To face this challenge, Cloudflare introduced creative and active ways in which we could better interact with one another. From the very first day, I was welcomed to an abundance of knowledge sharing talks and coffee chats with new and existing colleagues in different offices across the world. Whether it was data protection from the Legal team or going serverless with Workers, we were welcomed to afternoon seminars every week on a new area that was being pursued within Cloudflare.

Cloudflare not only retained the summer internship scheme, but in fact doubled the size of the class; this reinforced an optimistic mood within the entering class and a sense of personal responsibility. I was paired up with a mentor, a buddy, and a manager who helped me find my way quickly within Cloudflare, and without which my experience would not have been the same. Thanks to Omer, Pat, Val and countless others for all your incredible support!

Social interactions took various forms and were scheduled for all global time zones. I was invited to weekly virtual yoga sessions and intern meetups to network and discover what other interns across the world were working on. We got to virtually mingle at an “Intern Mixer” where we shared answers to philosophical prompts – what’s more, this was accompanied by an UberEats coupon for us to enjoy refreshments in our work-from-home setting. We also had Pub Quizzes with colleagues in the EMEA region to brush up on our trivia skills. At this uncertain time of the year, part of which I spent in complete self-isolation, these gatherings helped create a sense of belonging within the community, as well as an affinity towards the colleagues I interacted with.

Product Management at Cloudflare

My internship also offered a unique learning experience from the Product Management perspective. I took on the task of increasing the value of Network Analytics by giving customers and internal stakeholders improved  transparency in the traffic patterns and attacks taking place. Network Analytics is Cloudflare’s packet- and bit-oriented dashboard that provides visibility into network- and transport-layer attacks which are mitigated across the world. Among various updates I led in visibility features is the new trends insights. During this time the dashboard was also extended to Enterprise customers on the Spectrum service, Cloudflare’s L4 reverse-proxy that provides DDoS protection against attacks and facilitates network performance.

I was at the intersection of multiple teams that contributed to Network Analytics from different angles, including user interface, UX research, product design, product content and backend engineering, among many others. The key to a successful delivery of Network Analytics as a product, given its interdisciplinary nature, meant that I actively facilitated communication and collaboration across experts in these teams as well as reflected the needs of the users.

I spent the first month of the internship approaching internal stakeholders, namely Customer Support engineers, Solutions Engineers, Customer Success Managers, and Product Managers, to better understand the common pain points. Given their past experience with customers, their insights revealed how Network Analytics could both leverage the existing visibility features to reduce overhead costs on the internal support side and empower users with actionable insights. This process also helped ensure that I didn’t reinvent wheels that had already been explored by existing Product Managers.

I then approached customers to enquire about desired areas for improvements. An example of such a desired improvement was that the display of data in the dashboard was not helping users infer any meaning regarding next steps. It did not answer questions like: What do these numbers represent in retrospect, and should I be concerned? Discussing these aspects helped validate the needs, and we subsequently came up with rough solutions to address them, such as dynamic trends view. Over the calls, we confirmed that – especially from those who rarely accessed the dashboard – having an overview of these numbers in the form of a trends card would incentivize users to log in more often and get more value from the product.

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience
Trends Insights

The 1:1 dialogues were incredibly helpful in understanding how Network Analytics could be more effectively utilized, and guided ways for us to better surface the performance of our DDoS mitigation tools to our customers. In the first few weeks of the internship, I shadowed customer calls of other products; this helped me gain the confidence, knowledge, and language appropriate in Cloudflare’s user research. I did a run-through of the interview questions with a UX Researcher, and was informed on the procedure for getting in touch with appropriate customers. We even had bilingual calls where the Customer Success Manager helped translate the dialogues real-time.

In the following weeks, I synthesized these findings into a Product Requirements Document and lined up the features according to quarterly goals that could now be addressed in collaboration with other teams. After a formal review and discussion with Product Managers, engineers, and designers, we developed and rolled out each feature to the customers on a bi-weekly basis. We always welcomed feedback before and after the feature releases, as the goal wasn’t to have an ultimate final product, but to deliver incremental enhancements to meet the evolving needs of our customers.

Of course, all my interactions, including customer and internal stakeholder calls, were all held remotely. We all embraced video conferencing and instant chat messengers to make it feel as though we were physically close. I had weekly check-ins with various colleagues including my managers, Network Analytics team, DDoS engineering team, and DDoS reports team, to ensure that things were on track. For me, the key to working remotely was the instant chat function, which was not as intrusive as a fully fledged meeting, but a quick and considerate way to communicate in a tightly-knit team.

Looking Back

Product Management is a growth process – both for the corresponding individual and the product. As an individual, you grow fast through creative thinking, problem solving and incessant curiosity to better understand a product in the shoes of a customer. At the same time, the product continues to evolve and grow as a result of synergy between experts from diverse fields and customer feedback. Products are used and experienced by people, so it is a no-brainer that maintaining constant and direct feedback from our customers and internal stakeholders are what bolsters their quality.

It was an incredible opportunity to have been a part of an organization that represents one of the largest networks. Network Analytics is a window into the efforts led by Cloudflare engineers and technicians to help secure the Internet, and we are ambitious to scale the transparency across further mitigation systems in the future.

The internship was a successful immersive experience into the world of Network Analytics and Product Management, even in the face of a pandemic. Owing to Cloudflare’s flexibility and ready access to resources for remote work, I was able to adapt to the work environment from the first day onwards and gain an authentic learning experience into how products work. As I now return to university, I look back on an internship that significantly added to my personal and professional growth. I am happy to leave behind the latest evolution of Network Analytics dashboard with hopefully many more to come. Thanks to Cloudflare and all my colleagues for making this possible!

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)

Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-letter-from-cloudflares-founders-2020/

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)

To our stakeholders:

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010 — 10 years ago today. Stopping to look back over the last 10 years is challenging in some ways because so much of who we are has changed radically. A decade ago when we launched we had a few thousand websites using us, our tiny office was above a nail salon in Palo Alto, our team could be counted on less than two hands, and our data center locations on one hand.

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)
Outside our first office in Palo Alto in 2010. Photo by Ray Rothrock.

As the company grew, it would have been easy to stick with accelerating and protecting developers and small business websites and not see the broader picture. But, as this year has shown with crystal clarity, we all depend on the Internet for many aspects of our lives: for access to public information and services, to getting work done, for staying in touch with friends and loved ones, and, increasingly, for educating our children, ordering groceries, learning the latest dance moves, and so many other things. The Internet underpins much of what we do every day, and Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet seems more and more important every day.

Over time Cloudflare has gone from an idea on a piece of paper to one of the largest networks in the world that powers millions of customers. Because we made our network to be flexible and programmable, what we’ve been able to do with it has expanded over time as well. Today we secure the Internet end-to-end — from companies’ infrastructure to individuals seeking a faster, more secure, more private connection. Our programmable, global network is at the core of everything we have been able to achieve so far.

Updating Our Annual Founders’ Letter

This is also the approximate one-year anniversary of Cloudflare going public. At the time, we wrote our first founders’ letter to the potential investors. We thought it made sense on this day, which we think of as our birthday, to reflect on the last year, as well as the last 10 years, and start a tradition of updating our original founders’ letter on September 27th every year.

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)
Ringing the bell to go public on the NYSE on September 13, 2019.

It’s been quite a year for our business. Since our IPO, we’ve seen record expansion of new customers. That growth has come both from expanding our existing customers as well as winning new business from new customers.

The percentage of the Fortune 1,000 that pay for one or more of Cloudflare’s services rose from 10% when we went public to more than 16% today. Across the web as a whole, according to W3Techs’ data, over the last year Cloudflare has grown from 10.1% of the top 10 million websites using our services to 14.5% using them today. (Amazon CloudFront, in second place based on the number of websites they serve, grew from 0.8% to 0.9% over the same period.)

Every year to celebrate our birthday we’ve made it a tradition to launch products that surprise the market with new ways to expand how anyone can use our network. We think of them as gifts back to the Internet. Three years ago, for instance, we launched our edge computing platform called Workers. Today, just three years later, hundreds of thousands of developers are using Workers to build applications, many of which we believe would be impossible to build on any other platform.

This year we’re once again launching a series of products to extend Cloudflare’s capabilities and hopefully surprise and delight the Internet. One that we’re especially excited about brings a new data model to Workers, allowing even more sophisticated applications to be built on the platform.

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)

The Year of COVID

It is impossible to reflect on the last year and not see the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business, our customers, our employees, as well our friends, colleagues, and loved ones in the greater community. It’s heartening to think that for more than half of Cloudflare’s life as a public company our team has worked remote.

2020 was meant to be an Olympic year, but COVID-19 stopped that, like much else, from happening. Eight years ago, when Cloudflare was just two, the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, sent a message from the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. That message read “This is for everyone” and the idea that the Internet is for all of us continues to be a key part of Cloudflare’s ethos today.

When we started Cloudflare we wanted to democratize what we thought were technologies only available to the richest and most Internet-focused organizations. We saw an opportunity to make available to everyone — from individual developers to small businesses to large corporations — the sorts of speed, protection, and reliability that, at the time, only the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook could afford.

Giving Back to the Internet

Over 10 years we’ve consistently rolled out the latest technologies, typically ahead of the rest of the industry, to everyone. And in doing so we’ve attracted employees, individuals, developers, customers to our platform. The Internet is for everyone and we’ve shown that a business can be very successful when we aim to serve everyone — large and small.

Something Steve Jobs said back in 1988 still resonates: “If you want to make a revolution, you’ve got to raise the lowest common denominator in every single machine.” Although we aren’t selling machines, we think that’s right: democratizing features matters.

Just look at the scourge of DDoS attacks. Why should DDoS attack mitigation be expensive when it’s a plague on companies large and small? It shouldn’t, and we optimized our business to make it inexpensive for us and passed that on to our customers through Unmetered DDoS Mitigation — another feature we rolled out to celebrate our Birthday Week three years ago.

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)

In 2014, also during Birthday Week, we launched Universal SSL, making encryption — something that had been expensive and difficult — free for all Cloudflare customers. The week we launched it we doubled the size of the encrypted web. Let’s Encrypt followed shortly after and, together, we’ve brought encryption to more than 90% of the web and made the little padlock in your browser something everyone can afford and should expect.

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)
Percent of the web served over HTTPS as reported by Google.

Helping Customers During Their Time of Need

In January of this year, we rolled out Cloudflare for Teams. The product was designed to replace the legacy VPNs and firewalls that were increasingly anachronistic as work moved to the cloud. Little did we know how much COVID-19 would accelerate their obsolescence and make Cloudflare for Teams essential.

Both of us sat on call after call in mid-March with at first small, then increasingly mid-sized, and eventually large and even governmental organizations who reached out to us looking for a way to survive as their teams shifted to working from home and their legacy hardware couldn’t keep up. We made the decision to sacrifice short term profits in order to help businesses large and small get through this crisis by making Cloudflare for Teams free through September.

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)

As we said during our Q1 earnings call, the superheros of this crisis are the medical professionals and scientists who are taking care of the sick and looking for a cure to the disease. But the faithful sidekick throughout has been the Internet. And, as one of the guardians of the Internet, we’re proud of helping ensure it was fast, secure, and reliable around the world when it was needed most. We are proud of how Cloudflare’s products could help the businesses continue to get work done during this unprecedented time by leaning even more on the Internet.

Meeting the Challenges Ahead

Giving back to the Internet is core to who we are, and we do not shy away from a challenge. And there are many challenges ahead. In a little over a month, the United States will hold elections. After the 2016 elections we, along with the rest of the world, were concerned to see technology intended to bring people together instead be used to subvert the democratic process. We decided we needed to do something to help prevent that from happening again.

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)

Three and a half years ago, we launched the Athenian Project to provide free cybersecurity resources to any local, state, or federal officials helping administer elections in the United States. We couldn’t have built Cloudflare into the company it is today without a stable government as a foundational platform. And, when that foundation is challenged, we believe it is our duty to lend our resources to defend it.

Today, we’re helping secure election infrastructure in more than half of the states in the United States. And, over these last weeks before the election, our team is working around the clock to help ensure the process is fair and not disrupted by cyber attacks.

More challenges lie ahead and we won’t shy away from them. Well intentioned governments around the world are increasingly seeking to regulate the Internet to protect their citizens. While the aims are noble, the risk is creating a patchwork of laws that only the Internet giants can successfully navigate. We believe it is critical for us to engage in the conversations around these regulations and work to help ensure as operating online becomes more complex, we can continue to make the opportunities of the Internet created for us when we started Cloudflare available to future startups and entrepreneurs.

Fighting for the Internet

Over the last 10 years, it’s been sad to watch some of the optimism around technology seem to fade. The perception of technology companies shifted from their being able to do no wrong to, today, their being able to do no right. And, as we’ve watched the industry develop, we’ve sympathized with that shift. Too many tech companies have abused customer data, ignored rules, violated privacy, and not been good citizens to the communities in which they operate and serve.

But we continue to believe what we started Cloudflare believing 10 years ago: the Internet itself is a force for good worth fighting to defend. We need to keep striving to make the Internet itself better — always on, always fast, always secure, always private, and available to everyone.

It’s striking to think how much more disruptive the COVID-19 crisis could have been had it struck in 2010 not 2020. The difference today is a better Internet. We’re proud of the role we’ve played in helping build that better Internet.

And, ten years in, we’re just getting started.

A letter from Cloudflare’s founders (2020)

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020

Post Syndicated from John Graham-Cumming original https://blog.cloudflare.com/welcome-to-birthday-week-2020/

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020

Each year we celebrate our launch on September 27, 2010 with a week of product announcements. We call this Birthday Week, but rather than receiving gifts, we give them away. This year is no different, except that it is… Cloudflare is 10 years old.

Before looking forward to the coming week, let’s take a look back at announcements from previous Birthday Weeks.

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020

A year into Cloudflare’s life (in 2011) we launched automatic support for IPv6. This was the first of a long line of announcements that support our goal of making available to everyone the latest technologies. If you’ve been following Cloudflare’s growth you’ll know those include SPDY/HTTP/2, TLS 1.3, QUIC/HTTP/3, DoH and DoT, WebP, … At two years old we celebrated with a timeline of our first two years and the fact that we’d reached 500,000 domains using the service. A year later that number had tripled.

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020

In 2014 we released Universal SSL and gave all our customers SSL certificates. In one go we massively increased the size of the encrypted web and made it free and simple to go from http:// to https://. Other HTTPS related features we’ve rolled out include: Automatic HTTPS Rewrites, Encrypted SNI and our CT Log.

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020

In 2017 we unwrapped a bunch of goodies with Unmetered DDoS Mitigation, our video streaming service, Cloudflare Stream, the ability to control where private SSL keys stored through Geo Key Manager. And, last but not least, our hugely popular serverless platform Cloudflare Workers. It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years since we changed the way people think about serverless with our massively distributed, secure and fast to update platform.

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020

Two years ago Cloudflare became a domain registrar with the launch of our “at cost” service: Cloudflare Registrar. We also announced the Bandwidth Alliance which is designed to reduce or eliminate high cloud egress fees. We rolled out support for QUIC and Cloudflare Workers got a globally distributed key value store: Workers KV.

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020

Which brings us to last year with the launch of WARP Plus to speed up and secure the “last mile” connection between a device and Cloudflare’s network. Browser Insights so that customers can optimize their website’s performance and see how each Cloudflare tool helps.

We greatly enhanced our bot management tools with Bot Defend Mode, and rolled out Workers Sites to bring the power of Workers and Workers KV to entire websites.

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020

No Spoilers Here

Here are some hints about what to expect this year for our 10th anniversary Birthday Week:

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020
  • Monday: We’re fundamentally changing how people think about Serverless

If you studied computer science you’ll probably have come across Niklaus Wirth’s book “Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs”. We’re going to start the week with two enhancements to Cloudflare Workers that are fundamentally going to change how people think about serverless. The lambda calculus is a nice theoretical foundation, but it’s Turing machines that won the day. If you want to build large, real programs you need to have algorithms and data structures.

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020
  • Tuesday and Wednesday are all about observability. Of an Internet property and of the Internet itself. And they are also about privacy. We’ll roll out new functionality so you can see what’s happening without the need to track people.
Welcome to Birthday Week 2020
  • Thursday is security day with a new service to protect the parts of websites and Internet applications that are behind the scenes. And, finally, on Friday it’s all about one click performance improvements that leverage our more than 200 city network to speed up static and dynamic content.

Welcome to Birthday Week 2020!

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.