Cloudflare Expands Its Zero Trust Platform

By AIT News Desk On Dec 7, 2021

Launches Oahu Program to help customers easily move away from legacy firewalls with new capabilities, resources, and discounts

Cloudflare, Inc., the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, announced it’s expanding its Zero Trust firewall capabilities to help companies secure their entire corporate network across all of their branch offices, data centers, and clouds—no matter where their employees are working from. Cloudflare also announced Oahu, a new program to help customers migrate from legacy hardware to the Cloudflare One suite of Zero Trust solutions. Now, CIOs can better connect and secure their corporate networks with Zero Trust security—without the traditionally hard, costly or complex migration.

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Traditional firewalls consisted of hardware boxes installed on company premises, and were not designed for hybrid workforces or cloud applications. While some companies turned to “virtualized” firewalls to meet this challenge, these faced many of the same challenges as with hardware appliances, such as capacity planning and managing primary/backup devices. With Cloudflare’s new cloud firewall functionality, CIOs can better secure their entire corporate network, apply Zero Trust policies to all traffic, and gain deeper network visibility. And since Cloudflare’s firewall runs everywhere, CIOs no longer need to rely on centralizing traffic on one box in one location, physical or virtual.

The Oahu Program takes this further in a number of ways. First, it helps organizations with their Zero Trust migration by providing new capabilities and resources to simply and easily import policies from legacy hardware firewall boxes to Cloudflare’s cloud-native service. Second, eligible organizations can qualify for discounts on Cloudflare’s Zero Trust firewall solution to mitigate the cost of switching. And finally, as part of the program, eligible customers who deprecate hardware firewalls may be entered for a chance to win a trip to Oahu, Hawaii.

“CIOs know that the corporate network is changing fast, and we want to help make that transition easy, flexible, and scalable,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “When working from everywhere became possible, workers migrated from legacy locations like Palo Alto to work wherever they wanted. With our Oahu Program, we are making it easy for companies to leave legacy tech behind in favor of an everywhere firewall delivered from the cloud.”

Now, CIOs can transition to a fully cloud-native firewall, enabling them to:

Say goodbye to capacity planning or maintenance: Hardware firewalls are costly, hard to manage, and require tremendous capacity planning and maintenance. Cloudflare’s firewall can handle any size workload, no sizing needed.
Secure any type of traffic flow: With a cloud-native firewall, CIOs can operate a full suite of security capabilities across traffic from clouds, data centers, branch offices, and user devices.
Apply comprehensive security policies: A broad set of controls can support any network regardless of where an organization is in their cloud journey by enabling traditional L3 rules and sophisticated Zero Trust controls, all in one control plane.
Gain global visibility and control: Now, CIOs can enforce policies across the globe with one click and get single-pane visibility of traffic across the world, including advanced capabilities like on-demand packet captures.

Cloudflare One was launched in 2020 as CIOs were experiencing a drastic shift in the workplace—and how to protect it. Those changes have only accelerated since then, and Cloudflare has continued to invest and innovate to equip CIOs with the Zero Trust tools they need, with the number of customers more than doubling year-over-year and daily average traffic increasing nearly 5X. Teams of all sizes are using the Cloudflare One platform, from two-person startups to large enterprises with over 200,000 seats. Cloudflare now operates one of the world’s largest forward proxies, with daily traffic peaking above 1.69Tbps.

“JetBlue Travel Products needed a way to give crew-members secure and simple access to internally-managed benefit apps,” said Vitaliy Faida, General Manager, Data/DevSecOps of JetBlue Travel Products. “Cloudflare gave us all that and more with its Zero Trust model—a much more efficient way to connect business partners and crew-members to critical internal tools.”

“Cloudflare gave us fine-grained, Zero Trust access control over our internal applications throughout our distributed environment,” said Adam Healy, Chief Security Officer of BlockFi. “Which is an enormous improvement in our security posture.”

“Our employees and partners rave about how seamless Cloudflare’s Zero Trust functions are,” said Winston Nolan, Acting Web Development Manager of Kathmandu. “Ensuring security without making things too hard for non-technical users is challenging, as our users range from hardcore techies to laypeople. Secure global accessibility has to be a priority and Cloudflare’s solution delivers this, balancing security and usability from the edge super close to our users.”

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