Cloudflare, Inc. (Cloudflare) operates as a cloud services provider that delivers a range of services to businesses worldwide.
Cloudflare’s network serves as a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
The company delivers a broad range of services to businesses of all sizes and in all geographies — making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their bu...
Cloudflare, Inc. (Cloudflare) operates as a cloud services provider that delivers a range of services to businesses worldwide.
Cloudflare’s network serves as a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
The company delivers a broad range of services to businesses of all sizes and in all geographies — making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the complexity of managing individual network hardware. The company’s network serves as a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The company serves comprehensive customer needs across security and connectivity, and increasingly, the distributed and programmable nature of its network is resulting in customers building their applications on top of its network, too — including both traditional applications and those that are enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI).
Network
The company has built an efficient, scalable, programmable network that allows it to rapidly develop and deploy its products for its customers and that is architected to be flexible, scalable, and get more and more efficient as it expands. The company’s network is built to run every service on every server in every city. This design enables the company to grow capacity quickly and inexpensively and to allow it to shift customers and traffic across its network efficiently.
The company is also expanding the capabilities of its network servers to enable AI workloads that are suited to take into account the widely distributed nature of its network. Additionally, the company’s software is designed to manage the deployment and execution of its product developers’ code and its customers’ code across its network. Because the company manages the execution and prioritization of code running across its network, it means that it is both able to improve the performance of its highest paying customers, and also effectively leverage idle capacity across its network. The company has chosen to utilize this idle capacity to create a free tier of service which has generated substantial global scale for it. In turn, this scale makes the company attractive partners for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) globally, which reduces its co-location and bandwidth costs. As its network grows, these dynamics become even more powerful. The company’s network spans more than 335 cities in over 125 countries worldwide and interconnects with over 13,000 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud services, and enterprises.
Growth Strategy
The key elements of the company’s growth strategy are to acquire new customers; expand its relationships with existing customers; develop new products and solutions; and extend its developer solutions strategy:
Products
The company delivers a suite of deeply integrated products that serve as a unified control plane for its customers, allowing them to build, connect, and secure web applications and corporate infrastructure. Customers can quickly and easily join Cloudflare by using just one of the company’s products and then expand their usage of Cloudflare over time by adding additional products. The company’s full suite of products consists of its website and application services to deliver security, performance, and reliability for an organization's websites, applications, and application programming interfaces (APIs), its secure access service edge (SASE) platform, which contains its suite of Zero Trust and network services solutions to help ensure traffic in and out of an organization’s internal network and devices is verified and authorized as well as to securely connect data centers, cloud services, and branch offices to an organization with its Connectivity Cloud, its developer-based solutions to build and deploy serverless applications with scale, performance, security and reliability, and its consumer offerings.
Website and Application Services
Cloudflare offers a suite of website and application services products to help ensure that Internet properties, such as websites, applications, and APIs that are exposed to the Internet are safe from attack, and is fast and reliable. This suite of products also includes analytics products to provide a customer with the ability to build customized analytics to provide insights and intelligence to further protect and accelerate their Internet properties, such as monitoring threats, searching for specific search engine crawlers, understanding DNS query traffic, and analyzing real time data traffic.
Website and Application Security
The company provides an integrated cloud-based security solution designed to secure any combination of platforms, including public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, SaaS applications, and Internet of things devices. The company’s primary website and application security product offerings include:
Web Application Firewall (WAF): Protects a customer’s Internet properties from common vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and cross-site forgery requests, with no changes to the customer’s existing infrastructure.
Bot Management: Detects and manages undesired or malicious Internet traffic generated by malicious software programs called bots, while still allowing useful bots to access Internet properties through machine learning and behavioral analytics.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection: Protects a customer’s website applications from DDoS attacks, which are malicious attempts to disrupt the normal operations of an application, targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.
API Security (API Shield): Keeps customer APIs secure and productive with API discovery, integrated API management and analytics, and layered API defenses.
SSL / TLS Encryption: Manages encrypted secure socket layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) web traffic to prevent data theft and tampering to improve security, as well as application and website productivity. Advanced Certificate Manager (ACM) also provides a consolidated certificate management experience with greater configuration for managing multiple certificates.
Rate Limiting: Provides the ability to configure thresholds, define responses, and apply throttling rules across web applications and API endpoints.
Script Management (Page Shield): Protects website visitors from customer-side attacks that target vulnerabilities directly in the browser environment.
Security Center: An actionable dashboard that provides insights into threats, risks, and configuration suggestions, acting as a security practitioner’s home page.
Website and Application Performance
The company’s website and application performance solutions improve conversions, reduce churn, and improve visitor experiences by accelerating web and mobile performance, while keeping applications available and allowing its customers to run their digital operations much more efficiently. The company’s primary website and application performance product offerings include:
Content Delivery: Accelerates content delivery time by automatically serving the company’s customers' most popular content from its network locations close to its customers’ users.
Load Balancing: Enhances performance and reliability for single, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud environments. The company’s cloud-based products provide local and global load balancing to reduce latency by distributing traffic across multiple servers or by routing traffic to the closest geolocation region to the user.
DNS: Authoritative DNS keeps customer Internet properties online and available around the world, and DNS resolver returns the IP addresses of servers when a user enters a domain name.
Argo Smart Routing: Improves Internet performance by intelligently routing end users through less congested and more reliable paths over the Internet using the company’s network.
Video Stream Delivery: Caches and delivers HTTP(S) video content on websites, saving the customer on origin server bandwidth costs.
Web Optimization: Adjusts automatically the way content is delivered based on the particular device accessing the site to improve speed without affecting the customer’s Internet property look or features.
Cache Reserve: Serves a limited copy of a cached website, to keep it online for a customer’s visitors should the customer’s origin server go down.
Cloudflare Waiting Room: Allows organizations to route large volumes of users to a custom-branded virtual waiting room, helping preserve customer experience and protect origin servers from being overwhelmed with requests.
Cloudflare Data Localization Suite: Sets rules and controls at the network edge about where data is stored and protected, while taking advantage of Cloudflare's global network.
SASE Platform
The company’s SASE platform combines network services and Zero Trust security products to provide a comprehensive, cloud-based network- and security-as-a-service solution that is designed to be secure, fast, reliable, and define the future of the corporate network. Whereas some large companies had built their own proprietary networks to control and protect their employees working in virtual space, that model had significant limitations, including a price tag that was prohibitive for most companies and an inability to adapt well to increased use of mobile devices and remote work. By leveraging the public Internet, Cloudflare’s SASE platform brings together in a single pane of glass how employees connect, on-ramps for branch offices, secure connectivity for applications, and controlled access to SaaS applications.
Network Services
These products help the company’s customers connect, secure, and accelerate their corporate networks, without the need to manage legacy network hardware. This effectively enables Cloudflare to act as a secure wide area network (WAN) for all entities on a corporate network regardless of what device they use or where they are located.
Magic WAN: Connects and routes traffic between different networks within an enterprise, which are often broadly geographically dispersed, across Cloudflare's global network.
Magic Transit: Extends the benefits of the company’s network to customers' on-premises and data center networks. Magic Transit is deployed in front of an enterprise network and protects it at the IP layer from DDoS attacks and enables provisioning of a full suite of virtual network functions, including IP packet filtering and firewalling, load balancing, and traffic management tools.
Magic Firewall: Cloud-based firewall enables administrators to set policies for all traffic entering and leaving the network.
Cloudflare Network Interconnect: Direct Internet connectivity between Cloudflare’s global network and on-premises networks wherever they are, whether over a private network interconnect or over an Internet exchange.
Spectrum: Extends Cloudflare’s speed, security, and reliability functionality to TCP/UDP applications at the transport layer of the Internet, such as gaming applications and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) applications.
Zero Trust Security
These products shield users of a corporate network from attacks, inspect traffic for threats, and apply privilege rules to grant access to the customer's data and applications.
Cloudflare Access: Enforces Zero Trust application access based on identity.
Cloudflare Gateway: Filters all traffic crossing to customer employee devices to prevent malicious traffic reaching end-user devices.
Remote Browser Isolation: Runs a customer's browsers in the cloud as opposed to on-device, insulating devices from attacks.
Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB): Provides visibility and control over SaaS applications to help prevent data leaks and compliance violations.
Cloud Email Security: Protects users of a corporate network from phishing, business email compromise, and email supply chain attacks.
Data Loss Prevention: Inspects HTTP/S traffic for sensitive data like personally identifiable information (PII) and prevents exfiltration of customer information with allow or block policies.
Developer-based Solutions
By leveraging the company’s serverless platform, developers can build serverless applications on its network that scale without needing to spend time and effort on infrastructure or operations. This enables developers to deliver more performant applications that have global scale, all while improving their productivity. The company’s primary developer-based solutions include products categorized for AI, compute, storage & databases, and media.
AI
Workers AI: Enables developers to run machine learning models, powered by serverless GPUs, on the company’s global network.
Vectorize: Allows developers to easily store and query embeddings, representations of values or objects commonly consumed by machine learning models.
AI Gateway: Provides observability, caching, security, and routing features for AI applications.
Compute
Cloudflare Workers: Allows developers to augment existing applications or create entirely new ones through a lightweight execution environment without configuring or maintaining infrastructure.
Cloudflare Pages: Allows front-end developers to quickly and easily build, collaborate on, and deploy websites.
Storage & Databases
R2 Object Storage: Provides global object storage without egress frees.
Workers KV: Helps developers manage states for their applications with a globally distributed key-value storage.
Durable Objects: Enables a customer to build and run collaborative applications, such as chat rooms, games, and whiteboards, on the company’s global network.
D1: Enables developers to create serverless SQL databases.
Hyperdrive: Accelerates queries to databases by caching frequent query responses, maintaining primed connection pools, and optimizing routing.
Media
Cloudflare Stream: Enables live and on-demand video streaming from the company’s global network.
Cloudflare Images: Provides an end-to-end solution to cost-effectively build and maintain image infrastructure.
Cloudflare Calls: Enables developers to build real-time audio and video applications.
Consumer Offerings
The company’s consumer products make it easy for individuals to have a performant and secure Internet experience. Adoption of the company’s consumer offerings makes its business offerings more powerful and adoption of its business offerings improves its consumer offerings. The company’s consumer offerings also have been an effective and differentiated marketing channel to increase the awareness of its brand. The company’s primary consumer product offerings include:
1.1.1.1: A consumer DNS resolver app that provides a fast and private way to browse the Internet. The company’s implementation of 1.1.1.1 makes it among the fastest resolvers available, and it supports DNS over HTTPS (DoH) which encrypts and secures consumers’ DNS requests. An additional version of the company’s consumer DNS resolver known as 1.1.1.1 for Families adds a layer of protection to consumer home networks and protects them from malware and adult content.
WARP: A virtual private network (VPN) for consumers designed to secure and accelerate traffic on mobile devices. The basic version of WARP is included as an option with the 1.1.1.1 App for free, and a premium version that accelerates a user's Internet access is available for purchase.
Cloudflare Registrar: Offers secure registration and management of domain names.
Customers
The company views its millions of free and paying customers, which manage millions of Internet properties on its network, as part of a broad, global community.
As of December 31, 2024, the company had approximately 238,000 paying customers across more than 190 countries. The company’s paying customer base is highly diversified across organizations of all sizes in every major industry vertical, including technology, healthcare, financial services, consumer and retail, industrial, non-profit, and government. The company’s large customers included 3,497 as of December 31, 2024.
Cloudflare Impact
Cloudflare Impact is the platform for the company’s corporate social responsibility and sustainability programs.
In 2023, the company is committed to setting near-term company-wide emissions reductions in line with climate science with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), and as required by SBTi, it expects to submit its proposed reduction targets in 2025.
The company is also committed to respecting human rights under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and advancing and protecting freedom of expression and privacy consistent with the Global Network Initiative (GNI) Principles. As part of those commitments, it continues to develop its internal human rights practice, including mandatory human rights training for all employees, incorporating human rights due diligence into its operations, and multi-stakeholder engagement, including through GNI and the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner's B-Tech Project, Community of Practice. Cloudflare participates in periodic independent GNI Assessments, which include comprehensive audits of its human rights related policies, practices, and impacts.
Initiatives
Project Galileo: The company has equipped at-risk public interest groups with a set of its products that would otherwise censor their work. In December 2022, the company extended its Zero Trust security solutions to organizations under Project Galileo at no cost to further protect against security problems, such as data loss, malware, and phishing. The more than 2,900 recipients of services under Project Galileo include independent journalists reporting on repressive regimes, minority rights and arts groups in closed societies, and civil society organizations supporting democratic movements.
Athenian Project: The company created the Athenian Project to ensure that U.S. state and local governments’ election websites have the highest level of protection and reliability for free through a variety of its security solutions, including Enterprise DDoS protection, web application firewall, SSL certificates, content delivery network, and Zero Trust security solutions. The company has provided these benefits to more than 425 state and local election websites. During the 2024 election cycle in the United States, Cloudflare held more than 50 onboarding and support calls with state and local governments participating in the Athenian Project, and provided cyber threat briefings for more than 300 election officials across the country.
Cloudflare for Campaigns: Since 2020, the Cloudflare for Campaigns program has provided security services to help political campaigns and state political parties in the United States and around the world defend against cyber attacks and election interference. The company allows any eligible campaign to access a variety of its security solutions, including web application firewall, and DDoS protection, as well as internal data management and security controls.
Project Cybersafe Schools: The company launched Project Cybersafe Schools in 2023 as part of the White House's Back to School Safely: K-12 Cybersecurity Summit. The company provides eligible school districts with Zero Trust security solutions that help minimize exposure to harmful online content and common cyber threats, such as phishing and credential harvesting, for free and with no time limit. More than 131 school districts in 30 U.S. states participate in the Project Cybersafe Schools program.
Technology
The company’s distributed and proprietary network is the core of its technology and enables it to move data seamlessly from nearly any point on earth in a fast, efficient, and reliable manner. The company’s network has been built from the ground up as a single software stack it developed that runs its products in more than 335 cities and over 125 countries worldwide. This allows the company to scale quickly while offering a wide range of products and simultaneously lowering operating expenses.
Efficient Serverless Network Design
The company has developed a single software stack that is responsible for all of its products. The company has been able to efficiently scale its network by building it with commodity hardware components that are powered by its proprietary software. This integrated stack has made scaling, debugging, optimizing, and operating the company’s network and products easier and cheaper. It also allows the company to deploy changes across its entire worldwide network in a matter of seconds.
The company’s serverless network design allows each individual machine in its global network to run its software suite and provide its products. The company has built coordination software that ties together these thousands of machines into a single global network that allows it to efficiently route traffic to different physical locations and to individual machines. This enables the company to maximize utilization of its commodity hardware and provides different service levels to different customers. It also allows the company’s network to get more efficient and powerful as it adds each incremental server, regardless of where it is located. Every time the company adds a server or add a new city, its entire network improves.
Network Flexibility
The company’s network and products are API-driven and designed for developers. The company has an API-first mentality, which means anything a customer can do via its web interface can also be performed by its API. This allows the company’s customers to easily embed its service in their own workflows. For example, a customer can use the company’s web interface or API to change its custom configuration and that will be rolled out globally by its configuration software in seconds. This contrasts with many other vendors’ solutions where configuration changes can take hours and require professional services.
The company’s software is designed to spread loads dynamically across its entire distributed network depending on network conditions and traffic priority. This enables the company to deliver different quality of service depending on what customers pay it, ensuring its highest paying customers get the best performance and permitting it to serve its lower paying and free customers from excess capacity. The flexibility of the company’s serverless platform allows it to open it to third parties to write code directly on its network through its Cloudflare Workers product.
Sales
The company has a multi-pronged go to market approach that allows it to efficiently serve the needs of very small to very large customers. By using a combination of web self-service, direct sales, and indirect sales, the company is able to serve customers across a wide range of sizes, geographies, and vertical markets.
The company offers self-service access to certain of its products through its website and hosting partners where customers can either start on a free or paid plan and, as it demonstrates value, upgrade over time. Those customers on paid Pro and/or Business plans, which the company refers to as pay-as-you-go customers, are able to sign up for plans of bundled products, as well as individual offerings that are payable monthly or annually. Pay-as-you-go customers are able to onboard and customize the company’s products through its console and pay for their subscription using a credit card. The company’s automated and easy to use process enables it to efficiently onboard new customers or existing customers to new products without requiring any interaction with its sales team. As pay-as-you-go customers evolve their usage of its products, some upgrade to an Enterprise plan for greater control, higher service levels and terms, or productivity-related tools while existing contracted customers can add their increased usage or expanded products to their bills. The company refers to customers on an Enterprise plan as contracted customers.
The company sells directly to contracted customers through its global, technically-oriented inside and field sales teams, and indirectly through its ecosystem of channel partners that includes managed service providers, resellers, distributors, and global system integrators. For large contracted customers, its relationships often start with a portion of the customer’s overall network, security and application needs and expand over time as they consolidate other vendors’ services and increase their adoption of our products and services.
Marketing
The company’s marketing aims to clearly communicate the value of its offerings to a large and diverse set of global customers at scale. The company drives organic awareness and adoption of its products by providing a free offering that enables millions of users to experience the benefits of its global network before they adopt its pay-as-you-go offerings or contract for its Enterprise plan. The company engages with developers across blogs, social media, and other channels to help build its brand and visibility among technical communities. In addition, the company’s consumer products, including 1.1.1.1 and WARP, provide an effective and differentiated marketing channel to expand the awareness of its brand.
The company invests in a variety of targeted digital and non-digital marketing activities and programs to build awareness, engage with prospects, and build pipeline for its global sales teams. The company also shares stories of how large customers are rapidly adopting its services across use cases, industry verticals, and geographies, to communicate customer trust and its market momentum.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company had 334 issued patents and 72 pending patent applications in the United States and abroad. These patents and patent applications seek to protect the company’s proprietary inventions relevant to its business. The company’s issued patents are scheduled to expire between 2030 and 2044, and covers various aspects of its network and products. In addition, the company has registered Cloudflare as a trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions, and it has filed other trademark applications in the United States. The company is also the registered holder of a variety of domestic and international domain names that include Cloudflare (including Cloudflare.com).
History
Cloudflare, Inc. was founded in 2009. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2009.
