A new year, and now yet another week with news from Cloudflare. This time they’ve started with CIO Week 2023. As usual, there will be a lot more going on beyond press releases, so I’d like to bring it to attention right from the start, and put the landing pages here for ease of access:
- Welcome to CIO Week 2023: Welcome to CIO Week 2023
This CIO Week we’ll demonstrate how Cloudflare is helping CIOs keep data, devices and employees both safe and fast across hybrid and remote environments. We’ll show how Cloudflare accelerates digital transformation and modernizes networking and security towards a Zero Trust model.
- Landing page: CIO Week 2023
- Blog posts: CIO Week - The Cloudflare Blog
Today’s headline and press release available here. And here’s a shortened version, highlighting mine:
Cloudflare Announces New Solutions to Help CIOs Maximize Employee Collaboration and Productivity
Cloudflare, Inc., the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring, an all in one dashboard that helps CIOs understand how critical applications and Internet services are performing across their entire corporate network. Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring, part of Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform, will provide IT leaders with predictive, historical, and real time intelligence around application outages, network issues, and performance slow-downs to keep employees productive wherever they are working.
[…]
Cloudflare is empowering IT teams, equipping them with the intelligence and insights captured by Cloudflare’s global network to collect, detect, and surface issues before businesses even know something is wrong. Now, Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring will provide businesses with a single dashboard to measure and analyze mission critical applications and services like Microsoft 365 or connectivity issues with local Internet Service Providers.
Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring will be able to help organizations:
Define and monitor the most critical network resources: Now customers will have the ability to measure and analyze controlled flows of data to public or private resources by emulating traffic flows, helping visualize end-user experiences and allowing them to pinpoint issues as they arise.
Understand the minute-by-minute experiences of their users: With Cloudflare Zero Trust, customers will be able to drill into real-time data visualizations highlighting anomalies in connectivity or performance to keep employees safe, secure, and productive.
Save IT leaders countless hours in investigations: By gaining a comprehensive, step-by-step view into employees’ digital footprint, IT teams will be able to simplify investigations – spending less time trying to identify where issues are occurring and spending more time helping to resolve them.
Realize the power of Cloudflare’s network intelligence: By plugging into the Cloudflare global network, customers will be able to understand changes in Internet behavior and anticipate how these changes may impact their business.
Me here:
At a first glance, this sounds a bit like “Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX)”. Note that the status of this is “early access” and that features will be rolled out in the coming weeks. In other words, it won’t be an immediate revenue driver. Not directly, anyway.
You can read a more detailed description in their corresponding blog post. (Available here)
While I’m at it, for “non-techies” or anyone unfamiliar. You might notice Cloudflare WARP in the context of Cloudflare Zero Trust, and wonder that’s about. I find the following from another blog post from today (Weave your own global, private, virtual Zero Trust network on Cloudflare with WARP-to-WARP) helpful:
Millions of users rely on Cloudflare WARP to connect to the Internet through Cloudflare’s network. Individuals download the mobile or desktop application and rely on the Wireguard-based tunnel to make their browser faster and more private. Thousands of enterprises trust Cloudflare WARP to connect employees to our Secure Web Gateway and other Zero Trust services as they navigate the Internet.
In other words, WARP is a free consumer offering, and also their client for Zero Trust. So why is this understanding relevant? There’s a potential network effect at play, and it lowers the barrier for mass adoption.
Hope you find this useful.