Closing out 2022 with our latest Impact Report
To conclude Impact Week, which has been filled with announcements about new initiatives and features that we are thrilled about, today we are publishing our 2022 Impact Report.
In short, the Impact Report is an annual summary highlighting how we are helping build a better Internet and the progress we are making on our environmental, social, and governance priorities. It is where we showcase successes from Cloudflare Impact programs, celebrate awards and recognitions, and explain our approach to fundamental values like transparency and privacy.
We believe that a better Internet is principled, for everyone, and sustainable; these are the three themes around which we constructed the report. The Impact Report also serves as our repository for disclosures consistent with our commitments for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), and UN Global Compact (UNGC).
Check out the full report to:
- Explore how we are expanding the value and scope of our Cloudflare Impact programs
- Review our latest diversity statistics — and our newest employee resource group
- Understand how we are supporting humanitarian and human rights causes
- Read quick summaries of Impact Week announcements
- Examine how we calculate and validate emissions data
As fantastic as 2022 has Continue reading
Everything you might have missed during Cloudflare’s Impact Week 2022
And that’s a wrap! Impact Week 2022 has come to a close. Over the last week, Cloudflare announced new commitments in our mission to help build a better Internet, including delivering Zero Trust services for the most vulnerable voices and for critical infrastructure providers. We also announced new products and services, and shared technical deep dives.
Were you able to keep up with everything that was announced? Watch the Impact Week 2022 wrap-up video on Cloudflare TV, or read our recap below for anything you may have missed.
Product announcements
| Blog | Summary |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare Zero Trust for Project Galileo and the Athenian Project |
We are making the Cloudflare One Zero Trust suite available to teams that qualify for Project Galileo or Athenian at no cost. Cloudflare One includes the same Zero Trust security and connectivity solutions used by over 10,000 customers today to connect their users and safeguard their data. |
| Project Safekeeping – protecting the world’s most vulnerable infrastructure with Zero Trust | Under-resourced organizations that are vital to the basic functioning of our global communities (such as community hospitals, water treatment facilities, and local energy providers) face relentless cyber attacks, threatening basic needs for health, safety and security. Cloudflare’s mission Continue reading |
s OpenSLP service: CVE-2019-5544 and CVE-2020-3992. Data Clean Rooms: Enabling Analytics, Protecting Privacy
Data clean rooms offer a way for organizations to collaborate with and share data in a protected environment that preserves privacy and governance. Here's why they are on the rise now.Azure Host-Based SDN: Part 1 – VFP Introduction
Azure Virtual Filtering Platform (VFP) is Microsoft’s
cloud-scale virtual switch operating as a virtual forwarding extension within a
Hyper-V basic vSwitch. Figure 1-1 illustrates an overview of VFP building
blocks and relationships with basic vSwitch. Let’s start the examination from
the VM vm-nwkt-1 perspective. Its vNIC vm-cafe154 has a synthetic interface
eth0 using a NetVSC driver (Network Virtual Service Client). The Hyper-V
vSwitch on the Parent Partition is a Network Virtual Service Provider (NetVSP)
with VM-facing vPorts. Vm-cafe154 is connected to vPort4 over the logical
inter-partition communication channel VMBus. VFP sits in the data path between
VM-facing vPorts and default vPort associated with physical NIC. VFP uses
port-specific Layers for filtering traffic to and from VMs. A VFP Layer is a
Match Action Table (MAT) having a set of policy Rules. Rules consist of
Conditions and Actions and are divided into Groups. Each layer is programmed by independent, centralized Controllers without cross-controller dependencies.
Let’s take a concrete example of Layer/Group/Rule object relationship and management by examining the Network Security Group (NSG) in the ACL Layer. Each NSG has a default group for Infrastructure rules, which allows Intra-VNet traffic, outbound Internet connection, and load balancer communication (health check, etc.). We Continue reading
How Cloudflare advocates for a better Internet
We mean a lot of things when we talk about helping to build a better Internet. Sometimes, it’s about democratizing technologies that were previously only available to the wealthiest and most technologically savvy companies, sometimes it’s about protecting the most vulnerable groups from cyber attacks and online prosecution. And the Internet does not exist in a vacuum.
As a global company, we see the way that the future of the Internet is affected by governments, regulations, and people. If we want to help build a better Internet, we have to make sure that we are in the room, sharing Cloudflare’s perspective in the many places where important conversations about the Internet are happening. And that is why we believe strongly in the value of public policy.
We thought this week would be a great opportunity to share Cloudflare’s principles and our theories behind policy engagement. Because at its core, a public policy approach needs to reflect who the company is through their actions and rhetoric. And as a company, we believe there is real value in helping governments understand how companies work, and helping our employees understand how governments and law-makers work. Especially now, during a time in which many Continue reading
Working to help the HBCU Smart Cities Challenge
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a proud member of the HBCU (Historically Black College or University) alumni. The HBCU Smart Cities Challenge invites all HBCUs across the United States to build technological solutions to solve real-world problems. When I learned that Cloudflare would be supporting the HBCU Smart Cities Challenge, I was on board immediately for so many personal reasons.
In addition to volunteering mentors as part of this partnership, Cloudflare offered HBCU Smart Cities the opportunity to apply for Project Galileo to protect and accelerate their online presence. Project Galileo provides free cyber security protection to free speech, public interest, and civil society organizations that are vulnerable to cyber attacks. After more than three years working at Cloudflare, I know that we can make the difference in bridging the gap in accessibility to the digital landscape by directly securing the Internet against today’s threats as well as optimizing performance, which plays a bigger role than most would think.
What is an HBCU?
A Historically Black College or University is defined as “any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans, and Continue reading
The latest from Cloudflare’s seventeen Employee Resource Groups
In this blog post, we’ll highlight a few stories from some of our 17 Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), including the most recent, Persianflare. But first, let me start with a personal story.
Do you remember being in elementary school and sitting in a classroom with about 30 other students when the teacher was calling on your classmates to read out loud from a book? The opportunity to read out loud was an exciting moment for many of my peers; one that made them feel proud of themselves. I, on the other hand, was frozen, in a state of panic, worried that I wouldn’t be able to sound out a word or completely embarrass myself by stuttering. I would practice reading the next paragraph in hopes that I wouldn’t mess up when I was called on. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was dyslexic, and I could barely read, especially out loud to a large group of people.
That is where I began to know the feeling of isolation. This feeling compounded year after year, when I wasn’t able to perform the way my peers did. My isolation prevailed from elementary school to middle school, through high Continue reading
Helping build a safer Internet by measuring BGP RPKI Route Origin Validation
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the glue that keeps the entire Internet together. However, despite its vital function, BGP wasn't originally designed to protect against malicious actors or routing mishaps. It has since been updated to account for this shortcoming with the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) framework, but can we declare it to be safe yet?
If the question needs asking, you might suspect we can't. There is a shortage of reliable data on how much of the Internet is protected from preventable routing problems. Today, we’re releasing a new method to measure exactly that: what percentage of Internet users are protected by their Internet Service Provider from these issues. We find that there is a long way to go before the Internet is protected from routing problems, though it varies dramatically by country.
Why RPKI is necessary to secure Internet routing
The Internet is a network of independently-managed networks, called Autonomous Systems (ASes). To achieve global reachability, ASes interconnect with each other and determine the feasible paths to a given destination IP address by exchanging routing information using BGP. BGP enables routers with only local network visibility to construct end-to-end paths based on the arbitrary preferences of Continue reading
Introducing Cloudflare’s Third Party Code of Conduct
Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet, and we are committed to doing this with ethics and integrity in everything that we do. This commitment extends beyond our own actions, to third parties acting on our behalf. Cloudflare has the same expectations of ethics and integrity of our suppliers, resellers, and other partners as we do of ourselves.
Our new code of conduct for third parties
We first shared publicly our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics during Cloudflare’s initial public offering in September 2019. All Cloudflare employees take legal training as part of their onboarding process, as well as an annual refresher course, which includes the topics covered in our Code, and they sign an acknowledgement of our Code and related policies as well.
While our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics applies to all directors, officers and employees of Cloudflare, it has not extended to third parties. Today, we are excited to share our Third Party Code of Conduct, specifically formulated with our suppliers, resellers, and other partners in mind. It covers such topics as:
- Human Rights
- Fair Labor
- Environmental Sustainability
- Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption
- Trade Compliance
- Anti-Competition
- Conflicts of Interest
- Data Privacy and Continue reading
The unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses
In late August 2022, Cloudflare’s customer support team began to receive complaints about sites on our network being down in Austria. Our team immediately went into action to try to identify the source of what looked from the outside like a partial Internet outage in Austria. We quickly realized that it was an issue with local Austrian Internet Service Providers.
But the service disruption wasn’t the result of a technical problem. As we later learned from media reports, what we were seeing was the result of a court order. Without any notice to Cloudflare, an Austrian court had ordered Austrian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block 11 of Cloudflare’s IP addresses.
In an attempt to block 14 websites that copyright holders argued were violating copyright, the court-ordered IP block rendered thousands of websites inaccessible to ordinary Internet users in Austria over a two-day period. What did the thousands of other sites do wrong? Nothing. They were a temporary casualty of the failure to build legal remedies and systems that reflect the Internet’s actual architecture.
Today, we are going to dive into a discussion of IP blocking: why we see it, what it is, what it does, who it affects, Continue reading
Heavy Networking 660: Writing The Manual – An Insider’s View Of Product Documentation
On today’s Heavy Networking we get inside the process of technical writing and product documentation from a person deep in the trenches of creating docs. We also talk about why writing as a skill might be worth cultivating even if you aren’t responsible for creating the manual.
The post Heavy Networking 660: Writing The Manual – An Insider’s View Of Product Documentation appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Heavy Networking 660: Writing The Manual – An Insider’s View Of Product Documentation
On today’s Heavy Networking we get inside the process of technical writing and product documentation from a person deep in the trenches of creating docs. We also talk about why writing as a skill might be worth cultivating even if you aren’t responsible for creating the manual.Should You Choose A Manged Kubernetes Service Or Self-Host Kubernetes In The Cloud?
Once your organization has decided to implement Kubernetes, you have to make another incredibly important decision: Where is Kubernetes going to run? In this blog post, we’ll discuss managing Kubernetes yourself in the cloud vs. using a Managed Kubernetes Service or KaaS offering. What’s “Self-Hosted” Kubernetes? Kubernetes by itself is like the foundation of a […]
The post Should You Choose A Manged Kubernetes Service Or Self-Host Kubernetes In The Cloud? appeared first on Packet Pushers.