Cloudflare Application Services for private networks: do more with the tools you already love
Cloudflare’s Application Services have been hard at work keeping Internet-facing websites and applications secure, fast, and reliable for over a decade. Cloudflare One provides similar security, performance, and reliability benefits for your entire corporate network. And today, we’re excited to announce new integrations that make it possible to use these services together in new ways. These integrations unlock operational and cost efficiencies for IT teams by allowing them to do more with fewer tools, and enable new use cases that are impossible without Cloudflare’s “every service everywhere” architecture.
“Just as Canva simplifies graphic design, Cloudflare simplifies performance and security. Thanks to Cloudflare, we can focus on growing our product and expanding into new markets with confidence, knowing that our platform is fast, reliable, and secure.” - Jim Tyrrell, Head of Infrastructure, Canva
Every service everywhere, now for every network
One of Cloudflare’s fundamental architectural principles has always been to treat our network like one homogeneous supercomputer. Rather than deploying services in specific locations - for example, using some of our points of presence to enforce WAF policies, others for Zero Trust controls, and others for traffic optimization - every server runs a virtually identical stack of all of Continue reading
Cloudflare Zero Trust for managed service providers
As part of CIO week, we are announcing a new integration between our DNS Filtering solution and our Partner Tenant platform that supports parent-child policy requirements for our partner ecosystem and our direct customers. Our Tenant platform, launched in 2019, has allowed Cloudflare partners to easily integrate Cloudflare solutions across millions of customer accounts. Cloudflare Gateway, introduced in 2020, has grown from protecting personal networks to Fortune 500 enterprises in just a few short years. With the integration between these two solutions, we can now help Managed Service Providers (MSPs) support large, multi-tenant deployments with parent-child policy configurations and account-level policy overrides that seamlessly protect global employees from threats online.
Why work with Managed Service Providers?
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are a critical part of the toolkit of many CIOs. In the age of disruptive technology, hybrid work, and shifting business models, outsourcing IT and security operations can be a fundamental decision that drives strategic goals and ensures business success across organizations of all sizes. An MSP is a third-party company that remotely manages a customer's information technology (IT) infrastructure and end-user systems. MSPs promise deep technical knowledge, threat insights, and tenured expertise across a variety Continue reading
Give us a ping. (Cloudflare) One ping only.
Ping was born in 1983 when the Internet needed a simple, effective way to measure reachability and distance. In short, ping (and subsequent utilities like traceroute and MTR) provides users with a quick way to validate whether one machine can communicate with another. Fast-forward to today and these network utility tools have become ubiquitous. Not only are they now the de facto standard for troubleshooting connectivity and network performance issues, but they also improve our overall quality of life by acting as a common suite of tools almost all Internet users are comfortable employing in their day-to-day roles and responsibilities.
Making network utility tools work as expected is very important to us, especially now as more and more customers are building their private networks on Cloudflare. Over 10,000 teams now run a private network on Cloudflare. Some of these teams are among the world's largest enterprises, some are small crews, and yet others are hobbyists, but they all want to know - can I reach that?
That’s why today we’re excited to incorporate support for these utilities into our already expansive troubleshooting toolkit for Cloudflare Zero Trust. To get started, sign up to receive beta access and start using the Continue reading
Announcing SCIM support for Cloudflare Access & Gateway
Today, we're excited to announce that Cloudflare Access and Gateway now support the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol. Before we dive into what this means, let's take a step back and review what SCIM, Access, and Gateway are.
SCIM is a protocol that enables organizations to manage user identities and access to resources across multiple systems and domains. It is often used to automate the process of creating, updating, and deleting user accounts and permissions, and to keep these accounts and permissions in sync across different systems.
For example, most organizations have an identity provider, such as Okta or Azure Active Directory, that stores information about its employees, such as names, addresses, and job titles. The organization also likely uses cloud-based applications for collaboration. In order to access the cloud-based application, employees need to create an account and log in with a username and password. Instead of manually creating and managing these accounts, the organization can use SCIM to automate the process. Both the on-premise system and the cloud-based application are configured to support SCIM.
When a new employee is added to, or removed from, the identity provider, SCIM automatically creates an account for that employee in the Continue reading
Zone Versioning is now generally available
Today we are announcing the general availability of Zone Versioning for enterprise customers. Zone Versioning allows you to safely manage zone configuration by versioning changes and choosing how and when to deploy those changes to defined environments of traffic. Previously announced as HTTP Applications, we have redesigned the experience based on testing and feedback to provide a seamless experience for customers looking to safely rollout configuration changes.
Problems with making configuration changes
There are two problems we have heard from customers that Zone Versioning aims to solve:
- How do I test changes to my zone safely?
- If I do end up making a change that impacts my traffic negatively, how can I quickly revert that change?
Customers have worked out various ways of solving these problems. For problem #1, customers will create staging zones that live on a different hostname, often taking the form staging.example.com, that they make changes on first to ensure that those changes will work when deployed to their production zone. When making more than one change this can become troublesome as they now need to keep track of all the changes made to make the exact same set of changes on the Continue reading
API-based email scanning
The landscape of email security is constantly changing. One aspect that remains consistent is the reliance of email as the beginning for the majority of threat campaigns. Attackers often start with a phishing campaign to gather employee credentials which, if successful, are used to exfiltrate data, siphon money, or perform other malicious activities. This threat remains ever present even as companies transition to moving their email to the cloud using providers like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
In our pursuit to help build a better Internet and tackle online threats, Cloudflare offers email security via our Area 1 product to protect all types of email inboxes - from cloud to on premise. The Area 1 product analyzes every email an organization receives and uses our threat models to assess if the message poses risk to the customer. For messages that are deemed malicious, the Area 1 platform will even prevent the email from landing in the recipient's inbox, ensuring that there is no chance for the attempted attack to be successful.
We try to provide customers with the flexibility to deploy our solution in whatever way they find easiest. Continuing in this pursuit to make our solution as turnkey as Continue reading
New: Scan Salesforce and Box for security issues
Today, we’re sharing the release of two new SaaS integrations for Cloudflare CASB - Salesforce and Box - in order to help CIOs, IT leaders, and security admins swiftly identify looming security issues present across the exact type of tools housing this business-critical data.
Recap: What is Cloudflare CASB?
Released in September, Cloudflare’s API CASB has already proven to organizations from around the world that security risks - like insecure settings and inappropriate file sharing - can often exist across the friendly SaaS apps we all know and love, and indeed pose a threat. By giving operators a comprehensive view of the issues plaguing their SaaS environments, Cloudflare CASB has allowed them to effortlessly remediate problems in a timely manner before they can be leveraged against them.
But as both we and other forward-thinking administrators have come to realize, it’s not always Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and business chat tools like Slack that contain an organization’s most sensitive information.
Scan Salesforce with Cloudflare CASB
The first Software-as-a-Service. Salesforce, the sprawling, intricate, hard-to-contain Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, gives workforces a flexible hub from which they can do just as the software describes: manage customer relationships. Whether it be tracking Continue reading
Expanding our Microsoft collaboration: proactive and automated Zero Trust security for customers
As CIOs navigate the complexities of stitching together multiple solutions, we are extending our partnership with Microsoft to create one of the best Zero Trust solutions available. Today, we are announcing four new integrations between Azure AD and Cloudflare Zero Trust that reduce risk proactively. These integrated offerings increase automation allowing security teams to focus on threats versus implementation and maintenance.
What is Zero Trust and why is it important?
Zero Trust is an overused term in the industry and creates a lot of confusion. So, let's break it down. Zero Trust architecture emphasizes the “never trust, always verify” approach. One way to think about it is that in the traditional security perimeter or “castle and moat” model, you have access to all the rooms inside the building (e.g., apps) simply by having access to the main door (e.g., typically a VPN). In the Zero Trust model you would need to obtain access to each locked room (or app) individually rather than only relying on access through the main door. Some key components of the Zero Trust model are identity e.g., Azure AD (who), apps e.g., a SAP instance or a custom Continue reading
Email Link Isolation: your safety net for the latest phishing attacks
Email is one of the most ubiquitous and also most exploited tools that businesses use every single day. Baiting users into clicking malicious links within an email has been a particularly long-standing tactic for the vast majority of bad actors, from the most sophisticated criminal organizations to the least experienced attackers.
Even though this is a commonly known approach to gain account access or commit fraud, users are still being tricked into clicking malicious links that, in many cases, lead to exploitation. The reason is simple: even the best trained users (and security solutions) cannot always distinguish a good link from a bad link.
On top of that, securing employees' mailboxes often results in multiple vendors, complex deployments, and a huge drain of resources.
Email Link Isolation turns Cloudflare Area 1 into the most comprehensive email security solution when it comes to protecting against phishing attacks. It rewrites links that could be exploited, keeps users vigilant by alerting them of the uncertainty around the website they’re about to visit, and protects against malware and vulnerabilities through the user-friendly Cloudflare Browser Isolation service. Also, in true Cloudflare fashion, it’s a one-click deployment.
Protecting against deceptive links
With more than a couple Continue reading
How Cloudflare Area 1 and DLP work together to protect data in email
Threat prevention is not limited to keeping external actors out, but also keeping sensitive data in. Most organizations do not realize how much confidential information resides within their email inboxes. Employees handle vast amounts of sensitive data on a daily basis, such as intellectual property, internal documentation, PII, or payment information and often share this information internally via email making email one of the largest locations confidential information is stored within a company. It comes as no shock that organizations worry about protecting the accidental or malicious egress of sensitive data and often address these concerns by instituting strong Data Loss Prevention policies. Cloudflare makes it easy for customers to manage the data in their email inboxes with Area 1 Email Security and Cloudflare One.
Cloudflare One, our SASE platform that delivers network-as-a-service (NaaS) with Zero Trust security natively built-in, connects users to enterprise resources, and offers a wide variety of opportunities to secure corporate traffic, including the inspection of data transferred to your corporate email. Area 1 email security, as part of our composable Cloudflare One platform, delivers the most complete data protection for your inbox and offers a cohesive solution when including additional services, such as Data Loss Continue reading
One-click data security for your internal and SaaS applications
Most of the CIOs we talk to want to replace dozens of point solutions as they start their own Zero Trust journey. Cloudflare One, our comprehensive Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform can help teams of any size rip out all the legacy appliances and services that tried to keep their data, devices, and applications safe without compromising speed.
We also built those products to work better together. Today, we’re bringing Cloudflare’s best-in-class browser isolation technology to our industry-leading Zero Trust access control product. Your team can now control the data in any application, and what a user can do in the application, with a single click in the Cloudflare dashboard. We’re excited to help you replace your private networks, virtual desktops, and data control boxes with a single, faster solution.
Zero Trust access control is just the first step
Most organizations begin their Zero Trust migration by replacing a virtual private network (VPN). VPN deployments trust too many users by default. In most configurations, any user on a private network can reach any resource on that same network.
The consequences vary. On one end of the spectrum, employees in marketing can accidentally stumble upon payroll amounts for the Continue reading
Improved access controls: API access can now be selectively disabled
Starting today, it is possible to selectively scope API access to your account to specific users.
We are making it easier for account owners to view and manage the access their users have on an account by allowing them to restrict API access to the account. Ensuring users have the least amount of access they need, and maximizing visibility of the access is critical, and our move today is another step in this direction.
When Cloudflare was first introduced, a single user had access to a single account. As we have been adopted by larger enterprises, the need to maximize access granularity and retain control of an account has become progressively more important. Nowadays, enterprises using Cloudflare could have tens or hundreds of users on an account, some of which need to do account configuration, and some that do not. In addition, to centralize the configuration of the account, some enterprises have a need for service accounts, or those shared between several members of an organization.
While account owners have always been able to restrict access to an account by their users, they haven’t been able to view the keys and tokens created by their users. Restricting use of the Continue reading
How Cloudflare CASB and DLP work together to protect your data
Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) scans SaaS applications for misconfigurations, unauthorized user activity, shadow IT, and other data security issues. Discovered security threats are called out to IT and security administrators for timely remediation, removing the burden of endless manual checks on a long list of applications.
But Cloudflare customers revealed they want more information available to assess the risk associated with a misconfiguration. A publicly exposed intramural kickball schedule is not nearly as critical as a publicly exposed customer list, so customers want them treated differently. They asked us to identify where sensitive data is exposed, reducing their assessment and remediation time in the case of leakages and incidents. With that feedback, we recognized another opportunity to do what Cloudflare does best: combine the best parts of our products to solve customer problems.
What’s underway now is an exciting effort to provide Zero Trust users a way to get the same DLP coverage for more than just sensitive data going over the network: SaaS DLP for data stored in popular SaaS apps used by millions of organizations.
With these upcoming capabilities, customers will be able to connect their SaaS applications in just a few clicks and scan them Continue reading
Cloudflare Muscles In On Digital Experience Monitoring
Cloudflare is rolling out Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities to help IT get visibility into network and application performance issues, particularly for remote workers.
The post Cloudflare Muscles In On Digital Experience Monitoring appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Announcing the Authorized Partner Service Delivery Track for Cloudflare One
This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, Deutsch, Français, Español.
In this Sunday’s Welcome to CIO Week blog, we talked about the value for CIOs in finding partners for long term digital transformation initiatives. As the adage goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.”
As Cloudflare has expanded into new customer segments and emerging market categories like SASE and Zero Trust, we too have increasingly focused on expanding our relationship with go-to-market partners (e.g. service providers, implementation / consulting firms, system integrators, and more). Because security and network transformation can feel inherently daunting, customers often need strategic advice and practical support when implementing Cloudflare One – our SASE platform of Zero Trust security and networking services. These partners play a pivotal role in easing customer adoption by helping them assess, implement, and manage our services.
This blog is primarily intended for prospective and current Cloudflare go-to-market channel partners and highlights how we have grown our partnership program over the past year and will continue to, going forward.
Cloudflare One: fastest growing portfolio among Cloudflare partners
Over the past year, adoption of Cloudflare Continue reading
Preview any Cloudflare product today
With Cloudflare’s pace of innovation, customers want to be able to see how our products work and sooner to address their needs without having to contact someone. Now they can, without any commitments or limits on monetary value and usage caps.
Ready to get started? Here’s how it works.
For any product* that is currently not part of an enterprise contract, users with administrative access will have the ability to enable the product on the Cloudflare dashboard. With a single click of a button, they can start configuring any required features within seconds.
You have access to resources that can help you get started as well as the ongoing support of your sales team. You will be otherwise left to enjoy the product and our team members will be in contact after about 2 weeks. We always look to collect feedback and can also discuss how to have it added to your contract. If more time is needed in the evaluation phase, no problem. If it is decided that it is not a right product fit, we will offboard the product without any penalties.
We are working on offering more and more self-service capabilities that traditionally have not been offered Continue reading
Announcing Custom DLP profiles
Introduction
Where does sensitive data live? Who has access to that data? How do I know if that data has been improperly shared or leaked? These questions keep many IT and security administrators up at night. The goal of data loss prevention (DLP) is to give administrators the desired visibility and control over their sensitive data.
We shipped the general availability of DLP in September 2022, offering Cloudflare One customers better protection of their sensitive data. With DLP, customers can identify sensitive data in their corporate traffic, evaluate the intended destination of the data, and then allow or block it accordingly -- with details logged as permitted by your privacy and sovereignty requirements. We began by offering customers predefined detections for identifier numbers (e.g. Social Security #s) and financial information (e.g. credit card #s). Since then, nearly every customer has asked:
“When can I build my own detections?”
Most organizations care about credit card numbers, which use standard patterns that are easily detectable. But the data patterns of intellectual property or trade secrets vary widely between industries and companies, so customers need a way to detect the loss of their unique data. This can include internal project Continue reading
Cloudflare protection for all your cardinal directions
As the Internet becomes the new corporate network, traditional definitions within corporate networking are becoming blurry. Concepts of the corporate WAN, “north/south” and “east/west” traffic, and private versus public application access dissolve and shift their meaning as applications shift outside corporate data center walls and users can access them from anywhere. And security requirements for all of this traffic have become more stringent as new attack vectors continue to emerge.
The good news: Cloudflare’s got you covered! In this post, we’ll recap how definitions of corporate network traffic have shifted and how Cloudflare One provides protection for all traffic flows, regardless of source or destination.
North, south, east, and west traffic
In the traditional perimeter security model, IT and network teams defined a “trusted” private network made up of the LANs at corporate locations, and the WAN connecting them. Network architects described traffic flowing between the trusted network and another, untrusted one as “north/south,” because those traffic flows are typically depicted spatially on network diagrams like the one below.
Connected north/south networks could be private, such as one belonging to a partner company, or public like the Internet. Security teams made sure all north/south traffic flowed through one or Continue reading
Why do CIOs choose Cloudflare One?
Cloudflare’s first customers sought us out as the “Web Application Firewall vendor” or their DDoS-mitigating Content Delivery Network. We earned their trust by solving their problems in those categories and dozens of others. Today, over 100,000 customers now rely on Cloudflare to secure and deliver their Internet properties.
However, our conversations with CIOs evolved over the last few years. The discussions stopped centering around a specific product. CIOs, and CSOs too, approached us with the challenge of managing connectivity and security for their entire enterprise. Whether they described their goals as Zero Trust or Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), their existing appliances and point solutions could no longer keep up. So we built Cloudflare One to help them.
Today, over 10,000 organizations trust Cloudflare One to connect and secure their users, devices, applications, and data. As part of CIO Week, we spoke with the leaders of some of our largest customers to better understand why they selected Cloudflare.
The feedback centered around six themes:
- Cloudflare One delivers more complete security.
- Cloudflare One makes your team faster.
- Cloudflare One is easier to manage.
- Cloudflare One products work better together.
- Cloudflare One is the most cost-efficient comprehensive SASE offering.
- Cloudflare can be Continue reading
Network detection and settings profiles for the Cloudflare One agent
Teams can connect users, devices, and entire networks to Cloudflare One through several flexible on-ramps. Those on-ramps include traditional connectivity options like GRE or IPsec tunnels, our Cloudflare Tunnel technology, and our Cloudflare One device agent.
Each of these on-ramps send nearly all traffic to Cloudflare’s network where we can filter security threats with products like our Secure Web Gateway and Data Loss Prevention service. In other cases, the destination is an internal resource deployed in Cloudflare’s Zero Trust private network.
However, sometimes users want traffic to stay local. If a user is sitting within a few meters of their printer, they might prefer to connect through their local network instead of adding a hop through Cloudflare. They could configure Cloudflare to always ignore traffic bound for the printer, keeping it local, but when they leave the office they still need to use Cloudflare’s network to reach that printer remotely.
Solving this use case and others like it previously required manual changes from an administrator every time a user moved. An administrator would need to tell Cloudflare’s agent to include traffic sometimes and, in other situations, ignore it. This does not scale.
Starting today, any team using Cloudflare One has Continue reading