Tag Archives: Monday Mornings

Improving Cloudflare’s products and services, one feature request at a time

Post Syndicated from Mona Hadidi original https://blog.cloudflare.com/improving-cloudflare-products-and-services-one-feature-request-at-a-time/

Improving Cloudflare’s products and services, one feature request at a time

Improving Cloudflare’s products and services, one feature request at a time

I started at Cloudflare in April 2018. I was excited to join an innovative company that operates with integrity and takes customer needs into account when planning product roadmaps. After 2.5 years at Cloudflare, this excitement has only grown, as it has become even clearer that our customers’ feedback is essential to our business. At an all-hands meeting this November, Michelle Zatlyn, our co-founder and COO, said that “every time we see things and approach problems from the lens of a customer, we make better decisions.” One of the ways we make these decisions is through Customer Success Managers funneling our customers’ feedback to our product and engineering teams.

As a Strategic Customer Success Manager, I meet regularly with my customers to better understand their experience with Cloudflare and work cross-functionally with our internal teams to continually improve it. One thing my customers often mention to me, regardless of industry or size, is their appreciation that their feedback is not only heard but understood and actioned. We are an engineering-driven company that remains agile enough to incorporate customer feedback into our product roadmap and development cycle when that feedback aligns with our business priorities. In fact, for us, this customer feedback loop is a priority in and of itself.

Customer Success Managers, along with Solutions Engineers and Account Executives, convert customer feedback raised in Quarterly Business Reviews or other touchpoints into feature requests routed directly to Cloudflare’s Product and Engineering teams. Here’s how it works:

Improving Cloudflare’s products and services, one feature request at a time

  • A feature request is submitted in our internal CRM on behalf of Cloudflare customers. It includes a description of the request, details on the desired solution, any current or potential workarounds, and level of urgency.
  • All feature requests are then evaluated by our Solutions Engineering Subject Matter Experts to ensure they have the necessary data and are properly classified.
  • Product Managers then review the feature requests and connect them with our internal tracking systems.
    • Often, our Product and Engineering teams already have many of these features planned as part of our roadmap, but customer requests can influence when we take action on these items and/or how we build these products. Factors that can impact these decisions include:
      • How critical the requests are,
      • The volume of customer requests per product or feature,
      • Partnerships with customers and promises we’ve made to these customers, and
      • Strategic direction from Cloudflare leadership
  • After these feature requests are filed on behalf of our customers, our Product team may reach out to Customer Success Managers to schedule meetings with our customers to ensure they understand their specific use cases and incorporate these requirements into product development.

Let’s illustrate this process with a real-life example. One of my customers, a large financial institution (Customer A), uses Cloudflare for Secondary DNS. Secondary DNS allows an organization to use multiple providers to host and relay its DNS information. It is traditionally used as a synchronized backup for an organization’s primary DNS infrastructure. Secondary DNS offers redundancy across many different nameservers, all of which are synchronized and thus respond to queries with the same answers. Using a Secondary DNS configuration allows for resiliency, availability, and a better overall end-user experience.

This particular customer was evaluating a multi-vendor approach to DNS and HTTP services including DDoS mitigation, WAF, and CDN, potentially utilizing Cloudflare at all levels for certain web applications. Cloudflare and many other HTTP proxy services can be provisioned and enabled over DNS, responding to DNS queries with our own IP space, attracting customer traffic, and performing the required functions. Only then is this HTTP traffic sent upstream to a customer’s infrastructure. Because an organization’s Secondary DNS nameservers should all respond with the same synchronized answers, it means any given customer using “standard” Secondary DNS cannot also use their Secondary DNS providers for HTTP proxy services (Layer 7 DDoS mitigation, WAF, CDN, etc). Customer A wanted to leverage our proxy services while simultaneously relying on Cloudflare’s global scale and redundancy as a (Secondary) DNS provider.

Another customer interested in this feature (Customer B) was an organization whose on-premise DNS servers had logic that automatically updated their records. They wanted a single Secondary DNS provider that could receive their automated DNS record transfers and respond to queries at scale, while also allowing them to choose which records to proxy. This would let them benefit from Cloudflare’s DNS and proxy services without having to re-architect or migrate their entire DNS infrastructure.

I filed feature requests, and our DNS team reached out to schedule time with these customers to better understand their use cases and ensure the feature we were building would support their desired configuration.

Enter Secondary DNS Override: rather than responding to every DNS query with the answer pre-defined by a customer’s DNS master, the customer instructs Cloudflare, as Secondary DNS vendor, to, in some cases, respond to queries with Cloudflare’s own IP space, which is what enables our HTTP proxy services.

We created Secondary DNS Override to proxy traffic for Customer A’s web apps utilizing multi-CDN, allowing them to benefit from Cloudflare’s security and performance features, despite having Secondary DNS already in use. Once Secondary DNS override was implemented, any of their end-users receiving DNS responses from Cloudflare (remember, only one DNS provider of many) now experienced the benefit of Cloudflare’s HTTP proxy services. Customer B simply enabled the automatic transfer of zone files to Cloudflare and set up their on-premise infrastructure as “hidden primary”; they could now utilize Cloudflare proxy services as they had requested.

While building the feature, our DNS team and designated account teams remained in close contact with both of these customers and more to keep them updated every step of the way.

We shipped our Secondary DNS Override feature in November 2019, API-only at first, and UI feature parity followed the next quarter. Customers were able to take advantage of Secondary DNS Override via API as soon as it was available, while simultaneously giving feedback on what they hoped to see in Cloudflare’s UI. They were delighted with the consultative approach we took while building out their desired features, as we demonstrated commitment to a strong partnership.

This feature is one example of the countless requests that have resulted in products and features shipped by Cloudflare’s Product and Engineering teams. Most feature requests originate as customer feedback provided in Quarterly Business Reviews, led by Customer Success Managers as part of our Premium Success offerings, and at the annual health check as part of our Standard Success offering.

Maintaining a close relationship with our customers and ensuring they are deriving the most value from our products is of the utmost importance to Cloudflare CSMs. Tell your CSM today how Cloudflare can help you mitigate risk, increase ROI, and achieve your business objectives. To learn more about Secondary DNS Override specifically or Cloudflare in general, please visit this link and a member of our team will reach out to you!

When trusted relationships are formed, everyone wins!

Post Syndicated from Jake Jones original https://blog.cloudflare.com/when-trusted-relationships-are-formed-everyone-wins/

When trusted relationships are formed, everyone wins!

When trusted relationships are formed, everyone wins!

Key Points:

  • Customer Success Managers offer continual strategic and technical guidance by way of interactive workshops, account reviews, tuning sessions and regular product updates.
  • Our product development and design teams constantly work on new features and product updates based on your input.
  • It’s a team effort. As part of our Premium Success offering, we can introduce you to Product Managers for in-depth conversations about our solutions and how they can apply to your business goals.
  • Cloudflare is always rapidly evolving and expanding our solutions! As technology advances, so does the sophistication of attacks. Through machine learning and behavioural analysis, we are able to ship new products to ensure you remain secure without impacting performance.

Reach out to your Customer Success Manager to gain more information on how they can accelerate your business.

The Success Story

Hi there. My name is Jake Jones and I’m a Customer Success Manager at Cloudflare covering the Middle East and Africa. When I look at what success means to me, it’s becoming a trusted advisor for my customers by taking a genuine interest in their priorities and helping them reach desired goals. I’ve learnt that successful partnerships are a byproduct of successful relationship building. Every customer is unique with their own specific IT set-up, ranging from legacy, cloud and hybrid infrastructures. Here is a short tale of how a collaboration with a Cloudflare customer resulted in multiple wins…

Let’s call the customer Dynamic, which is a befitting name as we constantly work together to review their infrastructure and optimise the Cloudflare platform further. We’ve all heard the phrase “people buy from people”, but true buy-in comes from forming genuine relationships.

In late 2019, when Dynamic came to Cloudflare, we understood and welcomed their emphasis on vendor collaboration. To achieve this we met regularly and had interactive workshops together, to prioritise which of Cloudflare’s solutions would be the most valuable to them. We sought to understand how they operate, their infrastructure, and most importantly, how we could help. In the first few months of the relationship, we mapped out future initiatives, projects and mitigation strategies (should an attack arise).

In the spring of 2020 attacks did arise and were diverse in nature, aiming to overload their website and IP subnets – we could not let this happen! Fortunately, through proactive communication, we understood each other’s workflow and had pre-established how Cloudflare could quickly protect against vulnerabilities. The attack was quickly mitigated through our automatic DDoS protection, with Magic Transit ensuring Dynamics on-premise infrastructure remained safeguarded. In turn, their reputation was upheld and any financial loss was minimized.

Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom. We’re there for the good times too! For example, we love to get feedback and grant exclusive access to our beta (early release) launches as part of our Premium Success offering.

Having access to Cloudflare’s beta programme is an excellent opportunity to knowledge share and improve the user experience. With this information, we feedback to our product and design team with recommendations on new functionalities the customer would like to see. However, it’s not only our solutions that are enhanced. We are continually evolving our infrastructure and adding more capacity on our servers, to accommodate the growing market landscape.

The moral of the story is that collaboration and relationship building leads to secure platform consolidation and trust in those who manage it.

Get in contact

To all Enterprise Customers, contact your CSM. We are here to make you more successful! For all others that would like to know more, follow this link and one of our team will contact you to start you on your path to success.

How a Customer’s Trust in Cloudflare Led to a Big Win against Bots

Post Syndicated from Kate Fleming original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-a-customers-trust-in-cloudflare-led-to-a-big-win-against-bots/

How a Customer's Trust in Cloudflare Led to a Big Win against Bots

Key Points

  • Anyone with public-facing web properties is likely to have bot traffic on their website.
  • One type of bot that commonly targets eCommerce and online portals is a ‘scraper bot’.
  • Some scraper bots are good (such as those used by search engines to assess your website’s content to inform search results, or price comparison sites to help inform consumer decisions), however many are malicious, and will work to scrape not only images but also pricing data from your site for use by a competitor.
  • Many Bot Management providers will need to divert your traffic to a dedicated data centre to analyse your traffic and ‘scrub’ it clean from malicious bot traffic before sending it on to your site. While effective this will almost certainly add latency to the traffic’s ‘journey’ resulting in degraded user experience. Look for a technology partner with an expansive network who can scan your traffic in real time as it passes through any data centre on their network.
  • Good and bad scraper bots behave in largely the same way, making it difficult for bot protection systems to differentiate between the two. A common challenge with Bot Management solutions is that they can return a high number of false positives (legitimate bot or customer traffic blocked as though it were malicious). This can result in legitimate customers being challenged to various and repeated authentication challenges, or in extreme cases, blocked altogether. Look for a technology partner who can consistently return low rates of false positives on your traffic.

The Success Story

How a Customer's Trust in Cloudflare Led to a Big Win against Bots

I often joke that the key to understanding what that role of Customer Success is all about is to say: repeat the sentence again slowly… it’s there, in the name. Customer Success is, at its core, about making customers successful. And this is what makes our day, and makes us happy. Allow me to share a short story on how Cloudflare made a successful customer even more so with our Bot Management solution.

Once upon a time, an online property portal, let’s call them Property Portal, came to Cloudflare for our DDoS and WAF solution. We worked well together. The customer liked our ease of use and we delivered on our promise to provide performance and security to them. As Property Portal’s brand and digital footprint grew, so did the instances of malicious bot traffic, in particular ‘scraper bots’.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But when that imitation turns into someone else profiting off your IP, the shine starts to wear off, and that ‘imitation’ starts to become something more akin to outright theft. This is a challenge common to market leaders in the eCommerce and online portal space, where market leading organizations who pride themselves on presenting a solid portfolio of quality product offerings often find that competing sites seem to be not only replicating their content but matching or undercutting their prices in near real time.

Cloudflare wasn’t working with Property Portal when they first started facing these challenges, and as such, Property Portal engaged another party – at that time, one of the market leaders in the space – to provide a Bot Management solution for them.

At first pass, this seemed to solve the problem, however it wasn’t long before additional challenges became apparent:

  • performance was impacted slightly as this solution required traffic to be re-routed to a scrubbing centre to be ‘scrubbed’ of requests from bad bots before coming to their site;
  • a small percentage of malicious bots were still getting through and scraping valuable content of their website, and most damagingly;
  • Property Portal discovered that they were seeing a significant number of ‘false positives’, resulting in rising frustration for legitimate visitors (buyers, sellers and renters) repeatedly being asked to complete challenges in order to validate that they were human and not bots as they tried to navigate through the site.

During this time, Cloudflare released and matured our own Bot Management offering. Being aware that Property Portal weren’t seeing success from their existing solution, the account team began discussing the value of consolidating their bot solution with their DDoS and WAF offering from Cloudflare. We were given very clear success criteria which in technical terms, translated to the following:

  1. Don’t mess anything up, deprecate our user experience, or make us change our domains if we switch to you;
  2. Stop more of the bad traffic.;
  3. And most importantly, let more of the good users in, and stop challenging them as much as our current provider does (reduce the number of false positives).

We passed with flying colours. In addition, Property Portal was happy that they were able to consolidate additional services under one vendor.

For our side, Cloudflare now has the privilege of knowing that we are helping to improve the experience for many of Property Portal’s end customers, while at the same time working to protect their IP and hard work by keeping the ‘imitators’ and their scraper bots at a safe distance.

Happy Customer = Happy Customer Success Managers & Account Teams. Day made.

Would you like to know more?

Does any of the above feel familiar to you? Do your competitors have the uncanny ability to present near identical inventory, images or pricing to yours just as soon as you publish changes to your site? Or, are you keen to learn more in order to stay ahead of the bot armies?

Well, you’ve come to the right place, friend:

  • If you’re the self-serve type then take a look at our learning centre here and here, or our product pages. (And yes, we have a (good) chat bot there waiting to help you).
  • If ‘tuning in and geeking out’ is your preferred method of learning, then tune into the next episode of ‘Customers + Success’ on Cloudflare TV where I’ll be interviewing some of the people involved in this case, and hearing more about the challenges that this customer faced first-hand. The segment will air at 4PM PST October 21st / 7AM SGT October 22nd / 10AM AEST October 22nd, and will be appearing on the CFTV schedule in the next week.
  • Alternatively, if you consume your knowledge in old-fashioned human style feel free to contact us here. Someone from our team will be in touch to get you the answers you are looking for.