Cloudflare's Crushing It

Quite the month for NET. I know October’s not over yet, but thought I would post this a little early…

NET – Cloudflare kicked off October with a slew of releases in conjunction with its Birthday Week 2020. The party included a Launch Day video with industry experts sharing insights into many of the new offerings (https://cloudflare.tv/event/6TMmcBUtpEu7nbuVwr5qqz). Most were developer tools integrating with Cloudflare’s Workers platform, including:

As if that wasn’t enough, NET’s subsequent Zero Trust Week proved an even bigger event. The major news here was the unveiling of Cloudflare One, “a platform to connect and secure companies and remote teams anywhere, on any device” (https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2020/Cloudflare-Ann…). This Zero Trust offering enables fast and safe connections from anywhere in the world without exposing users to the public internet. It makes personal devices safe for business in any environment with any cloud provider. This release was paired with several partnership announcements, including CrowdStrike, VMware Carbon Black, SentinelOne and Tanium (https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-one/). From a technical standpoint, this suggests Cloudflare One should integrate seamlessly with several best-in-class partner offerings. From a story standpoint, such an impressive list of initial collaborators gives NET instant street cred in the security realm. One particular Street seemed especially smitten, immediately pushing the shares up 20%+ on the news. Make no mistake, this new security layer is a major addition to Cloudflare’s product line. Some key features include:

  • Cloudflare Gateway, which creates a fully secure gateway inspecting all internet traffic for incoming threats (https://blog.cloudflare.com/gateway-swg/). Think of it as a cloud-based solution replacing traditionally clumsy VPN’s for secure access from remote locations (I think I have that right).

  • Cloudflare One Intel, which streamlines security by analyzing data across Cloudflare’s entire network to create actionable insights for keeping users secure (https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one-intel/).

  • Isolated Browsing, which is currently in beta. This feature allows browsers to operate on the edge in the safety of a Cloudflare data center rather than on the end user’s machine (https://blog.cloudflare.com/browser-beta/). This could solve a major pain point for companies with remote employees who need to safely access the internet.

  • Magic Firewall, a network-level firewall securing enterprise customers through Cloudflare’s services (https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-magic-firewall/). This feature works with Cloudflare One to protect remote users, branch offices, data centers and cloud infrastructure under one roof.

And finally:

Phew! That’s an awful lot to process. All I can say is, “Wow.” When Cloudflare said it was rolling out the red carpet for its 10th anniversary, it wasn’t kidding. Further details on all the above and more can be found on the company blog (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/product-news/). Cloudflare has consistently emphasized its drive to be developer-centric and customer-driven. These enhancements suggest NET has very much put its R&D money where its mouth is. The company exits October with tremendous business momentum, and I am very much looking forward to hearing what management has to say when NET reports November 5. My current trust is greater than zero the news could be good.

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Quite the month for NET

Hi stocknovice,
That was really a staggering output of new technology by Cloudflare, and an awesome compilation by you. I don’t understand the technology, but I understand that they are moving full speed in a lot of directions, and partnering with GoogleChrome, CrowdStrike, VMware Carbon Black, SentinelOne and Tanium. It’s really impressive.

And that is while its nearest competitor seems to be having some kind of existential crisis, has seen its growth rate fall by 20 points, is having some kind of mysterious problem with falling usage which it hasn’t elucidated, is two and a half years behind on Edge Compute and can’t seem to get out of beta, is signing up less than 2% of the number of paying clients that Cloudflare is in a quarter (1/61st), is signing up less than 9% of the number of enterprise clients that Cloudflare is in a quarter (7/80), etc.

Best,

Saul

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And via a twitter reply to myle from CEO Matthew Prince on October 15th, “We actually are doing one more product announcement week before the end of the year, focused around Privacy + Compliance. #StayTuned

Cloudflare continues its incredibly strong record of new products.

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