Cloudflare for Teams: Protecting corporations without sacrificing performance

Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, announced that it has launched Cloudflare for Teams, a set of solutions that will secure corporations and their employees globally, without sacrificing performance. Cloudflare for Teams is centered around two core products: Cloudflare Access and Cloudflare Gateway.

Cloudflare Access

Cloudflare Access is a Zero Trust identity and access management solution that secures, authenticates, and monitors user access to ensure that employees and devices are who they say they are. To do this, Cloudflare is working with identity providers, including Okta, OneLogin, and Ping Identity.

Cloudflare also works with major endpoint security providers, including VMware Carbon Black, Malwarebytes, and Tanium to ensure that users’ devices accessing applications have the latest protections and updates.

With employees and contractors spread around the world, the traditional VPN model is slow, clunky and a pain to work with. As a result, employees often try to circumvent corporate VPNs, creating additional security risks for themselves and for their companies.

Because Access is built on Cloudflare’s existing global network, which spans 200 cities in more than 90 countries, it sits within 100 milliseconds of nearly all of Cloudflare’s users. With this scale, Cloudflare can deliver an experience to teams that is safe and fast, no matter where they are in the world.

Cloudflare Gateway

Cloudflare Gateway is a new solution being developed that will secure and filter outbound Internet traffic to protect employees from threats on the public Internet. Gateway will also ensure that Internet-browsing employees don’t bring malware or vulnerable code into the organization.

Existing technologies can slow down the user experience or are not effective at stopping attacks. Gateway will instead keep employees and their devices safer online, without sacrificing performance. Cloudflare is also partnering with cloud networking partners including Ciphercloud and Cloudgenix to deliver these solutions to enterprises.

Gateway will replace firewall appliances in offices, negate the need for new hardware, eliminate expensive MPLS fees, and deliver anti-malware scanning and software closer to the user, stopping threats before they hit the network.

Three versions are in development that will be available:

• Gateway will include DNS-based filtering and audit logging
• Gateway Pro will secure all Internet-bound traffic
• Gateway Enterprise will deliver data loss prevention and include always-on browser isolation from the newly-acquired S2 Systems Corporation

“With the rise of SaaS, cloud, and an increasingly mobile workforce, existing security solutions don’t work for modern-day employees or their employers,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.

“Employees need to access their applications quickly and securely, browse the public Internet without threatening company security, and be able to do all of this no matter where they are. Cloudflare for Teams gives companies and their employees a better way to do work, without added inconvenience.”

Benefits of Cloudflare for Teams

• Fast: Cloudflare for Teams is built for speed from the ground up. Threat filtering runs on one of the world’s fastest DNS resolvers and delivers a VPN replacement that will improve performance, instead of slowing users down.
• Vast threat intelligence: Cloudflare for Teams applies the threat intelligence collected from securing more than 20M Internet properties and blocking an average of 72B cyber threats per day.
• Seamless to implement and manage: Cloudflare for Teams is expected to take less than an hour to deploy and saves hours of end-user time compared to traditional VPN solutions. IT teams can also manage comprehensive network security within the same dashboard or through Cloudflare’s partners, including Splunk, Datadog, and Sumo Logic.
• Massive scalability: With 30 Tbps of network capacity, Cloudflare’s network can scale to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprises.
• Built-in DDoS mitigation: Hackers are increasingly targeting office infrastructure for denial of service attacks. Cloudflare for Teams is built with the same industry-leading DDoS mitigation benefits as Cloudflare for Infrastructure.
• Near users, wherever they are—literally: Instead of backhauling traffic, users connect to Cloudflare’s network in 200 cities around the world, within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the developed world’s Internet-connected population.

Cloudflare for Teams customers

“Cloudflare Access has enabled Ziff Media Group to seamlessly and securely deliver our suite of internal tools to employees around the world on any device, without the need for complicated network configurations,” said Josh Butts, SVP Product & Technology, Ziff Media Group.

“VPNs are frustrating and lead to countless wasted cycles for employees and the IT staff supporting them,” said Amod Malviya, Cofounder and CTO, Udaan.

“Furthermore, conventional VPNs can lull people into a false sense of security. With Cloudflare Access, we have a far more reliable, intuitive, secure solution that operates on a per user, per access basis. I think of it as Authentication 2.0 — even 3.0”

“Roman makes healthcare accessible and convenient,” said Ricky Lindenhovius, Engineering Director, Roman Health.

“Part of that mission includes connecting patients to physicians, and Cloudflare helps Roman securely and conveniently connect doctors to internally managed tools. With Cloudflare, Roman can evaluate every request made to internal applications for permission and identity, while also improving speed and user experience.”

Cloudflare for Teams partners

“We’re excited to partner with Cloudflare to provide our customers an innovative approach to enterprise security that combines the benefits of endpoint protection and network security,” said Tom Barsi, VP Business Development, VMware.

“VMware Carbon Black is a leading endpoint protection platform (EPP) and offers visibility and control of laptops, servers, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure at scale.

“In partnering with Cloudflare, customers will have the ability to use VMware Carbon Black’s device health as a signal in enforcing granular authentication to a team’s internally managed application via Access, Cloudflare’s Zero Trust solution.

“Our joint solution combines the benefits of endpoint protection and a zero trust authentication solution to keep teams working on the Internet more secure.”

“Rackspace is a leading global technology services company accelerating the value of the cloud during every phase of our customers’ digital transformation,” said Lisa McLin, vice president of alliances and channel chief at Rackspace.

“Our partnership with Cloudflare enables us to deliver cutting edge networking performance to our customers and helps them leverage a software defined networking architecture in their journey to the cloud.”