Understanding Cloudflare’s network architecture

Hi. In this video, we're going to talk about some of the most pressing challenges organizations face in connecting and securing their networks, applications, users, and data, and how Cloudflare's connectivity cloud is uniquely built to solve them. But first, let's take a quick look back to understand the context for these challenges. For decades, the data center was the single protected heart of the enterprise. It was the central hub for application security and IT infrastructure. You had internal apps for employees and external apps for customers. IT teams drew a clean trusted perimeter around it. Then you use private networking like MPLS to pipe corporate traffic in and stacked up security appliances like hardware firewalls and anti-distributed denial-of-service tools to keep malicious traffic from the public internet out. Security was based on this clear perimeter boundary. Trusted inside and the wild, wild west outside. But this model is now fundamentally broken, and three main changes shattered that clean perimeter. First, employees are no longer just in the office on the corporate network. They are now working from anywhere, needing secure, fast access to corporate resources from home, coffee shops, and even 30,000 ft in an airplane. Second, many of those internal applications have migrated from servers in the data center into virtual machines running in public clouds. The same applications, but IT no longer has to run the servers or worry about hardware failover or scaling network capacity. And third, many critical internal tools have been redesigned and are now consumed as SaaS applications living entirely on the public internet. This explosion of distributed users, apps, and data means it's impossible to use the old perimeter-based security to protect this new environment. Attackers now find parts of your corporate network distributed all over the place, making the attack surface much, much more complex for IT to monitor and secure. Funneling everything into and out of a central data center firewall simply just doesn't work anymore. As each new challenge surfaced, the industry responded with a specialized point solution. Trying to secure a public web app? Deploy a web application firewall. Worried your API is subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack? Implement DDoS protection. Need to secure your remote workforce? Deploy a ZTNA solution, plus a secure web gateway, plus a separate DLP tool. Each of these solutions is typically purchased and configured by different specialized vendors. Individually, these tools make sense to solve specific problems, but when you zoom out, what you get is a colossal spaghetti mess. Organizations are burdened with a sheer overhead and cost of managing countless discrete products, each built by a different vendor, none of which are designed to natively integrate with the others, and each protecting their small piece of the puzzle. They don't share data or use the same policies. You might have a phishing campaign targeting your email service, but your email security solution isn't sharing the threat intel data with your website protection services, which are under attack from the same source. Security becomes fragmented, policy enforcement is inconsistent, and agility slows to a crawl. What if we could take a step back and design a network from the ground up for a world that is inherently distributed? That's what we did. We built the Cloudflare connectivity cloud with a fundamentally different approach. It starts with our global network of hundreds of data centers in over 330 cities in over 125 countries. And the network is not just about the locations, it's the intelligence in between them. Our global private backbone, along with 13,000 interconnections, blankets the world, sitting both inside and as an overlay for the public internet. This architecture ensures that our services are deployed close to where if your customers, your employees, and your applications are, anywhere on Earth. This unified programmable network fabric provides a level of resiliency that is absolutely critical. If there's an issue on the public internet or a maintenance event on a specific network, the traffic is seamlessly and intelligently rerouted. This global interconnected platform is the foundation upon which we solve your most complex security and performance The network is made up of servers on which we run a wide variety of Cloudflare software to solve your business challenges. First, we secure and connect your external-facing applications and APIs. Tools like our web application firewall, advanced DDoS protection, and CDN deliver traffic to end users quickly and stop threats right at the nearest Cloudflare data center, preventing malicious traffic from ever getting close to your own servers or public cloud environment. Second, we enable and secure your internal workforces. This includes replacing your aging VPN appliances with modern zero-trust network access to securely connect employees to private resources. Then we have secure web gateway and DLP services all integrated for inspecting and securing all traffic headed out to the public internet. And network-as-a-service, a modern alternative to SD-WAN to simplify the IT stack and management overhead for remote offices and retail locations. Crucially, we deliver all services for both public and private resources from the exact same platform. Our competitors typically focus on one or the other, but as the boundaries between public and private blur, a unified platform that addresses both at the same time is essential for your ability to be agile. There's a huge additional piece to the Cloudflare advantage, our developer platform. Traditionally, applications lived only in your data center or a We've exposed the same technology we used to build our own products on our servers to anyone. Now our customers are building entirely new features and applications, or even entire apps, directly on our global network using tools like Cloudflare Workers. This allows them to deploy code which runs on servers in data centers closer to their customers, which means lower latency and incredible performance. Plus, Cloudflare is one region, region Earth. You don't have to decide on the geographic location for your app, we intelligently deploy it everywhere. Developers get unparalleled agility and a great experience, and they never have to compromise on security or performance because all these capabilities are built right into the platform that they're coding on. Cloudflare provides the only solution architected for this distributed future. We eliminate the cost and complexity of the point solution spaghetti mess by delivering one integrated, high-performance, and secure network. To learn more about how Cloudflare connectivity cloud can help your organization thrive in the distributed world, visit our website at cloudflare.com. Thank you for watching.