Cloudflare Careers Day: Community @ Cloudflare
Presented by: Ooma Gurewan, Omer Yoachimik, Guido Jimenez, Alina Ha, Kyra Meier-Klodt, Jessica Iyer, Lee Sam, Harriet Hay, Cristina Lasagni
Originally aired on March 9 @ 3:00 AM - 4:00 AM EST
Cloudflare would not be the same without our Employee Resource Groups. In this session, we have invited ERG leads to talk about how we discuss important events, celebrate different cultures and people, and support our employees in different ways.
If you're interested in a career with Cloudflare, you can apply by clicking on this link: https://boards.greenhouse.io/careersday/jobs/3085504?gh_jid=3085504#app
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EMEA
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Transcript (Beta)
And welcome. Thanks everyone for tuning in. You're watching the Community at Cloudflare segment during Careers Day.
My name is Lee Sam. I'm part of the recruiting team and I'll be the moderator for this segment.
Why does community matter?
So I saw an interesting quote which you may have heard of before. Diversity is being invited to the party.
Inclusion is being asked to dance. I think that quote was from a lady called Verna Myers and that's why community matters.
So during this segment for the next 30 minutes, I've got a few representatives from some of our different employee resource groups or ERGs and they're each going to share a little bit about themselves and about the ERGs that they are part of.
So sit tight and I hope you enjoy the session. So let's spend the first few minutes just introducing ourselves and why don't we kick off with Alina.
Tell us a bit about yourself. Hi, my name is Alina Ha. I work as a customer success manager in London office and I'm part of Asian Flare ERG.
I've been in Cloudflare for a little bit over a year now.
Fantastic. Thanks Alina. Kyra. Hi everyone.
I'm Kyra Myer-Clode. I work as a marketing associate for EMEA here in London and I'm part of Afroflare.
I'm one of the UK leads for the ERG and I've been here for about nine months.
Fantastic. Harriet. Hi everyone. I'm Harriet. I'm also based in London.
I am the office manager for EMEA. So I look after our EMEA offices and luckily my role naturally lets me touch base with working with a lot of ERGs in general, just with events and stuff.
But I mainly look after women Flare.
Great. And how long have you been with Cloudflare? So just over two years. Yeah, just over two years.
I started as an office coordinator and then I got promoted last year to operations manager.
Congrats. Jessica. Yeah. So my name is Jessica and I work on the customer success team with Alina.
Similarly to Harriet, I started off in a different role.
So I started off as a BDR and I've been with the company for a little over a year and a half now.
So I got involved within they see Flare kind of from the get go and also put my foot into Green Cloud, which is the ERG for sustainability.
It's a working group. Yeah. Great. Thanks, Jessica. Oma, tell us a bit about yourself.
Hi, my name is Oma. I'm an account executive here in Cloudflare looking after the Middle East region.
I've been with Cloudflare now for nearly two years and heavily involved as one of my greatest passion away from work is about the care and kindness to people's mind and heart.
So I'm about the UK lead, EMEA lead for the Mind Flare ERG and representing wellness within the company, especially across the offices in EMEA.
Great stuff. And I've actually joined a few of your sessions.
So look forward to learning a bit more about that later, Uma. Thank you.
Oma, tell us a bit about yourself. Hi, everyone. I'm Oma. I'm the product manager for DDoS based in London.
I've been with Cloudflare for a little over two years, which is when I moved to London as well from Tel Aviv.
I'm part of the ERG's Proudflare and also Judeoflare for the Jewish community.
Fantastic. Thank you, Oma.
Christina. Hi, everyone. My name is Christine I work as a customer development manager for Southern Europe.
And aside from a team here at Cloudflare, I look after two beautiful kids.
So why not being part of a fantastic ERG which is called Proudflare, which looks after parents like myself to be inclusive and support each other.
And if you don't mind me asking, how old are your kids, Christina?
One is nine months and the other one is, yeah, almost four. Wow.
So I bet they keep you pretty busy. Yeah, just a bit. And last but not least, Guido.
Hi, everybody. My name is Guido Jimenez. I'm a systems engineer at the network engineering department, which is hiring in Lisbon, by the way.
I've been with Cloudflare for almost two years now.
And I am the co-lead of the EMEA chapter of Latinflare, which is the group that represents Latin Americans in Cloudflare.
Yeah, fantastic.
Well, thank you all for being part of this segment. And we're really looking forward to learning a bit more about yourselves and your various ERGs.
So we opened the segment by kind of talking about why the difference between diversity inclusion and why community matters.
And for people who might be wondering, why does community matter or why does diversity even matter to Cloudflare?
Something that I think we've all heard from our leadership quite frequently is that diverse teams drive better business results.
And also on a segment that I was watching earlier where Rory, who's one of our privacy compliance specialists, he said he made a great point that diverse teams also build better products.
And so that's kind of why communities like ours are so important. So what we're going to do over the next sort of 20, 25 minutes is learn a bit more about the different ERGs that you all kind of represent.
So Alina, you're part of Asian Flare and May is actually APAC Heritage Month.
Is that right? Yes. Yeah. So tell us a bit about that.
So basically, as you know, in the United States, May, where our team is observing Asian American and Pacific Icelander months, and we've decided with leaders of Asian Flare and Daisy Flare together to make a global impactful month where we amplify and give voices to our colleagues of Asian descent and Pacific Icelanders and our allies.
And what we're doing with this month is basically doing a lot of Cloudflare TV segments, talking about our personal career paths, our growth as people.
And also we're doing a lot of fireside chats with leaders of different startups of Asian and Icelander Pacific descent just to give a voice of people looking like us and sharing their experience.
Yeah. And has this been your first time kind of playing an active role in such an ERG or is this something you've had experience on before?
No, it's actually the first time. So I'm a leader for Asian Flare in London.
And this has been a great journey personally, because I'm a mixed Asian, my dad is Korean, my mom is Kazakh.
And actually being part of Asian Flare gave me a chance to dive in deeper into where I come from, what's my culture and kind of come together with my Asian-ness, if I want to say that.
And it was a great way of connecting with others that might have the same experience that I do.
Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks so much for that, Alina. Kira, so you obviously shared with us that you just joined Cloudflare about nine months ago, and I believe you are a member of Afroflare.
We've both got the same banner.
So tell us a bit about Afroflare and what they do. Absolutely. So Afroflare, the name gives it away, is the ERG for the Afro-Caribbean community across Cloudflare.
We focus on creating places where we can speak about everything that we're going through.
I think in this climate specifically, it's so important to have a place where we can talk about the things that are going on in the world and be open about it.
I think in many workplaces that I've been in in the past, indirectly have not given me a space to talk about what's happening outside and bring all of myself to work.
And I think that's really important. And Afroflare allows me, for example, being Ghanaian to do that and to bring all of myself to work and to have the ability to talk to colleagues of mine, have a space where I can say, OK, this is happening in the news.
It's making me feel some type of way, or let's talk about these larger issues, or let's just have fun and talk about what it's like to, I don't know, get to love from your local Ghanaian restaurant.
So I think that's what the space is designed for. We spend a lot of time creating resources for Afroflare allies as well, for all allies to have access to relevant information and feel also included in our community.
And then we create a lot of safe spaces and activities for us to do.
And the largest events being, of course, UK and US Black History Month.
So we spend a lot of time having great programs for those as well.
I've got to say, that is one thing I'm not too happy about, that Black History Month happens twice in two different parts of the world.
I don't know who I need to speak to about that. We need to address that at some point.
But also, as you were talking there, what was really fascinating is that just learning just now that you're Ghanaian, because I'm also Ghanaian, and I never knew that.
So I'm literally just found that out live on Cloudflare TV, which is fascinating.
The other fascinating thing is that you're also a founder of an organization called Heroic Women, right?
Can you tell us a bit about that?
Yes, absolutely. So Heroic Women is just a storytelling platform for women, specifically women of color, to talk about their experiences in a really, I guess, raw and unfiltered way.
We cover a lot of topics. And I just wanted to create that to give everybody a voice to say exactly what's going on and not be censored at all.
And that also connects me to Afroflare. I think that's what I was so surprised and so thankful for was that it's a place where we can really speak about our feelings.
We have bi-weekly meetings about just, it's called Afroflare Kicking It.
And you just talk about what's going on and how you're feeling and have somebody address, okay, how was your week actually?
I saw this happen in the news. How are you feeling about it?
That kind of thing. So I think it's just important to have spaces to talk about things.
And that's also why I created Heroica because alongside being Black, for me also, just being a woman is another factor.
And I like to talk about both of those things and be part of communities that incorporate those.
Yeah. One idea or theme that I've heard quite a lot recently is the idea of intersectionality.
And I guess that you being a Black woman in tech, that's probably something quite relevant for you, but a discussion for another day, perhaps.
Anyway, when the pandemic's over, you and I need to hook up and go get some jollof somewhere.
Absolutely. Or I'll make it. Or you should make it. Are you good? You won't want my cooking.
You'll probably fall ill. Anyway, Christina, so I've actually been working with you sort of on the recruiting side for sales.
And obviously, when you introduced yourself, you shared that you were a mum of two young kids.
You're also representing ParentFlare. Tell us a bit about your experience as a mum at Cloudflare.
Well, I think it's so funny that you mentioned that because I think I was one of the first mums here at Cloudflare in sales.
So in the very, very beginning, in 2000, in the far away, like 2017, there were very few people.
And I had my first kid here and just recently had my second one. So I think it's been a journey.
So I think as the community, as the office expanded, I think there is this desire and need among employees to also have a support network, especially when it comes to being a parent, because nobody tells you.
But it's a hell of a ride.
It has bumps along the way. You have to do your best when you're with your children, do your best when you're at work.
And still, you need to strike that mental balance in trying to do everything and be best at everything, especially if you're a mum, right?
So we often talk about the mental load on mums and everything that goes along with that.
And I think here at Cloudflare, there is this fantastic ERG which is called, as you mentioned, ParentFlare, that exactly is aimed at offering you a support network, because you really need that safety net.
You need your balance, to maintain a mental balance.
You need to confront your experience with others.
And you need support. You know where to go if you need support, if you need to be heard, if you really want to express yourself, not being afraid of being judged like any other ERG.
So it's really an active community that daily exchange tips.
Especially during the pandemic, we were with all these kids around, we didn't know what to do with them.
So it was like also suggesting what activities we could do with kids.
On the other hand, how we can, you know, increase the interest of kids in STEM.
So, you know, organize these kids at work day, like coding and things like that.
So it sounds, it is really busy, being a parent, especially at Cloudflare, and trying to manage everything.
So really ParentFlare is aimed to new parents or parents or everybody that is interested in understanding what being a parent is.
So I found it very, very good coming back from Alternative and still have this support by being a parent, especially with new kids, you need something.
Yeah. And what, you know, what accommodations have you found, you know, Cloudflare and your manager within sales have made to allow you to continue to do your best work at Cloudflare as a mom of two kids?
You know, did your role change at all?
Or what some accommodations made for you? And I think this is a very important topic.
I think one of the best things about Cloudflare is that there is understanding and we embrace diversity.
We cannot be all parents with kids.
There are also other people that have like a smaller family or, you know, they're single, they're students.
We are very diverse here at Cloudflare. We pride ourselves of that diversity.
And I think there is an understanding from manager, but also from peers of what your lifestyle is and how it changes as you progress along the journey of being a parent.
And it's fantastic to have that flexibility to organize your day, how you want to be still able to perform, but also to dedicate, you know, some time, really dedicate and be present with your kids, because ultimately you want to be good for your kids.
So you kind of separate the two things.
You need to be also a person and you need to be great as a person to give them an example to follow.
And the company really allows you to separate that kind of moment and let you organize the day as you wish.
So from my perspective, Cloudflare has been very accommodating.
And I try to do the same, of course, with my team. Yeah.
And for anybody who might be watching, who is a manager, you know, in another company or maybe runs a similar ERG at their company, what do you think would be the top tip you would give them to make their organization more welcoming for moms like yourself?
I think there is at work, because we all are very busy and we go also fast.
We don't stop and we don't think enough about what other, what challenges people could go through.
Or, you know, sometimes we write quick email or we just write a quick message in the chat.
I would say, take the time to really understand what your employees are going through, because emotionally they could be, you know, going through different phases and not necessarily they always give the answer that we expect to have.
So I think, never assume, don't be biased, ask as many questions as you want, but definitely checking emotionally with each individual in your team, in your company, to make sure that there are no misunderstanding, because ultimately, you know, a parent, there are research that really show that parents are absolutely key for innovation and for solving problems, because the way your brain develops, the way your brain works when you're a parent is, you know, under arching and evolving that kind of capability.
So it's definitely an advantage being a parent in some way. Yeah, fantastic.
Thank you so much for sharing that insight, Christina. So Harriet, you're the office manager for actually a few of our EMEA offices, is that right?
Yeah, for all of them. Yeah, so you're a very important lady, especially when it comes to snacks.
You're saying it wrongly, it's schnapps. But also you're a member of Women Flair.
Tell us a bit about some of the the EIG events that you helped organise before the pandemic in those offices.
Yeah, the good old days. So I've obviously partnered with yourself, with Afroflair, and Jessica and Omar.
So yeah, mainly to do with the food and the schnapps.
But for instance, for Black History Month, as you know, we reached out to various caterers, to provide different themed lunches each week.
So for those of you who haven't been in the office yet, we had team lunch every Wednesday.
Sad times, say goodbye to that. But yeah, so we've partnered with the ERG leads in the London office, and we would organise massive feasts, dependent on what was happening at that time.
But throughout the year, we partner with like the ERG leads and make sure that we've got lots of fun things happening in the office and support them any way possible when it came to organising logistics and whatnot.
All right. And I imagine when we eventually do return back to the office, when it's safe to do so, I imagine we will kind of pick up again on some of those in-person events when it's obviously safe, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, obviously, as soon as possible, as you said, when it's safe, we would love to.
And it was a lovely part of being in the office. And it means everybody can experience different things, especially if somebody's not involved in an ERG heavily, it gives them an opportunity to, you know, really get stuck in and get involved in an event.
And then I suppose, as dynamics change, especially for my team, because our roles are so heavily based in the office, I didn't, I wasn't as involved with ERGs, which is why I've started helping the EMEA women flair leads, Malavika and Anna.
So I've been assisting them with a lot of like women flair stuff.
So as we moved virtually, Anna and Malavika organised a virtual magic show.
So the lady that ran it was on Britain's Got Talent. It was really good, actually.
Yeah, it was super fun. I don't know if any of you attended it. So that was really great fun.
And there's been some really super interesting and insightful fireside chats with internal and external execs, female execs.
So they've been amazing.
And, yeah, and we've got more things coming. But we also had a women's circle.
So our Pilates instructor Ruth blocked out about three or four hours, I think it was one Friday afternoon, and people could pop in and out.
And she done like yoga flow and meditation and journaling. So yeah, there's lots of stuff still going on, even though it's virtually.
But I suppose the nice thing about virtual events is everybody can get involved.
Because when you just have a specific office event for London, it doesn't mean, you know, Munich or Lisbon or Paris can get involved.
But this way, it means everybody can get involved.
So that is the plus side of virtual events, I think. Yeah, fantastic. Thanks so much for that insight, Harriet.
Jessica, so you you're actually involved in two ERGs.
Tell us a bit about those. Yeah, so they see flare is essentially an ERG for people of Asian heritage, South Asian heritage.
So that would include all countries in South Asia without, you know, trying to picture, pick one or two in or out.
So we're basically come together and talk about what's important for our community.
What are the what are the common points? What do we struggle with on a day to day basis?
And kind of also just talk about what we want to celebrate. So ultimately, all ERGs, like I said, is bringing your full self to work.
So all we want to do is try to encourage people and try to really make sure that nothing is left at home, you bring your whole self to work and, and you embrace that.
And, you know, like we've all said today, Cloudflare really embraces diversity.
And I feel like we all have the opportunity to, if there's no ERG yet to make one and to start a community to start something that we are really passionate about.
So that's kind of how it came about.
And a green cloud is less so a resource group, more so a working group, I would say, because it's not to it's not, you know, a community for, for minorities, per se, but it is, it is still important to, you know, take care of the earth that we live on and, and really try to have sustainable practices so that we can all do better together.
And some of the focuses when we were back in the office with Harriet, we've talked about this is how to make, you know, these snacks more, more sustainable, and how to reduce more plastic and, and get more sustainable packaging on some of our products, and also renewable energy, and things like that.
Whereas now that we're at home, we're looking at some things that we can control from virtually, it's just things like, you know, how to be how can, how can we make some pension fund ample, you know, invest in more greener pots instead of crude and, you know, the, the usual ones that are by default chosen.
So I think we're trying to really look at what, what everybody's ideas are, bring them together and give it a platform.
That's essentially what ERGs are about.
And, and anybody can get involved. It's not only people who are part of that community, but we also welcome allies, and we welcome people who whoever wants to get involved, essentially.
Yeah, fantastic. I mean, and I think the, you know, the work of green cloud alone, we probably need a segment, just for you to just talk, you know, just on that, because there's just so many things, interesting things that you're, you know, you and green cloud are doing there.
So really fascinating. Thanks for sharing that, Jessica. We're down to about, oh, we've been given more time.
So we actually only had four minutes left, we've now been given 33 minutes.
So, so we've got a bit more time, which is great, because it means I don't have to rush Omar, Guido and Uma to speak really quickly.
So thank you, organisers for that extra time. So, Uma, you are part of MindFlare.
Tell us a bit about not only MindFlare, but also your background and what you do.
Sure. So first of all, thank you for the organisers for giving us extra time.
And Akwaba to my Lee and Kyra from Ghana, Akwaba. So yeah, so I'm part of MindFlare ERG.
I guess MindFlare came to light just at the beginning of the pandemic, where, you know, everybody left the office, and was working from home.
And it was a new life, a new way of thinking.
And I guess probably at the beginning, it was exciting working from home.
But you know, as time went on, you know, people were feeling a little bit isolated, that their colleagues, their peers, their touch, their go to, and working remotely in itself, irrespective of what your environment is at home, caused a lot of concern for people.
You know, you have people in the organisation that have family at home, young kids at home, and they're having to work in that condition of noise and being a parent and being a work environment.
Then on the other hand, you also have people that are alone, or maybe flat sharing or isolated in their home.
And when you consider that we spend 70% of our time in the workplace, to have that removed from us by working alone, you know, obviously will have an effect on the mental state.
So you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, MindFlare came together, the ERGs across the different parts of Cloudflare globally, came together and came up with initiatives in terms of, you know, what we could do to help people.
And I know that, you know, Harriet on her side did a lot of like yoga and Pilates and initiatives to get people moving.
And on the MindFlare side, it was about how do we get people to think within as opposed to think outside because the outside world was not present.
So I myself run weekly, a mindfulness session.
I am a clinical hypnotherapist and psychotherapist trained with the idea that one day when the corporate world becomes too much, I can donate my life to looking after fragile minds.
So I volunteer my service every week on Wednesday to give mindfulness breathing.
So coping exercises for people at home to start doing whether it's breathing, and whether it's just meditating, go into a silent space and just, you know, control the mind, control the noise that goes on in people's mind, you know, mental health, awareness and mental health in itself is a very, very wide topic.
And everybody in our life will suffer it.
I have been a sufferer of it myself. And I guess when you are a sufferer of it yourself, you become more interested in terms of turning that around for other people.
So I always walk around with a an invisible tool bag of coping mechanism.
And part of MindFlare is about sharing that with the people in Cloudflare to better their lives, better their day to day mindset so that they can be more efficient.
MindFlare itself have loads of initiatives, whether it's heart based meditation, whether it's the mindfulness session, we also have Ginger as an organization that the people of Cloudflare can refer to in terms of looking for help, and support, whether it's counseling, etc.
And how did you get into hypnotherapy?
How it came to me, it came to me, I think I have always been very, very interested in my own self care about instead of, you know, typically, when people go through something in their life, they would look outwards for resolution.
And that could be drink, that could be drugs, that could be sex, that could be, you know, other alternatives, whatever it is, to try or comfort eating, whatever it is to resolve that pain.
And being a Hindu myself, I've been brought up with spirituality as part of part of my life.
So praying is a big part of me.
But I've extended it to not be religious based, just more spiritual based.
So I've always found areas to cope within myself mentally, whether that was just praying, whether that was just taking time and reading, reading books that taught me to almost indoctrinate my mind.
So when I reached a point in my life where I thought, you know what, one day I know, corporates is very good, they've served me well, they provided for my lifestyle.
But to some respect, you know, I wanted to give back.
And the only way I could give back was offering part of myself. So I trained to be a counselor, so that I could help others along the way.
And I think Cloudflare has given me the opportunity now to do that within Cloudflare, which has been a great foundation for me, because it helps in my supervision hours.
But it also, you know, allows to spread the word that there is an alternative, whether it's you know, popping a pill or drinking yourself, there is an alternative that actually works.
And science proves that, you know, just calming the mind down, breathing techniques, you know, reduces stress, reduces blood pressure, and calms the mind down.
And that's a huge interest to me. Yeah, I always had this misconception that hypnotists would get you to sit down in a chair, wave in front of you.
And they basically can make you do silly things like, I'm not a stage hypnotist.
I'm a hypnotherapist. So the hypno part of it looks at getting you into a half sleep state.
And that's when the subconscious mind is open to suggestion work.
And that's the therapy work that goes with hypnotherapy. You know, because when you get into that, you can make change happen within six seconds in your mind.
And the mind is the biggest tool that you have. And we create the dramas in our mind, sometimes it is about having that switch and knowing where that switch is, to take away the drama and get, you know, logical women, we're very emotional, you know, so there's a lot more noise in women than there is in men.
But nevertheless, when you know, when it happens for men, they're the ones that really have to get logical.
And if someone was interested in learning more about hypnotherapy, is there a book or a website you'd recommend to them?
Oh, there's loads.
I mean, you know, Google in itself is gives you a lot of information about my books that I read is, it's, it's more spiritual based, but it teaches the same foundation, which is about, you know, listening to yourself making the noise.
I always say that, for example, if you're stuck in a traffic, for people stuck in a traffic, those four people will think differently of the same situation.
So the situation doesn't stay, it's the way you look at it, you'll perceive that somebody may get angry, somebody's very calm, and understand they can't change traffic.
So what that teaches you is, you know, people's perception and version of the same, same activities different, but it's not different, the situation is constant.
Yeah.
Okay, that's really, really insightful. Thanks for sharing that with us.
Guido, so you've got a really interesting background, because you grew up in Costa Rica.
I believe you then moved to Dublin for a period. And now you're in London, obviously, with us here at Cloudflare.
And you're part of the ERG Latin Flare, right?
So tell us a bit about Latin Flare for somebody who maybe doesn't have any Costa Rican friends or doesn't know much about your heritage.
Tell us a bit about it.
Fair. I actually had a, there's almost four years in between Dublin and here in London, where I, my wife and I lived in Prague.
So yeah, we've been around a little bit in around Europe.
So that's been obviously a very enriching experience.
So, I mean, Latin Flare, I guess, all ERGs to a certain degree, what we want to do is help like raise awareness about like specific context of being a particular type of group of people in our society.
So we all have, you know, our own, like, yeah, our own context into how we want to do that and how that manifests.
So one of the ways that manifests in Latin Flare that I really like, and I really, you know, kind of push, all of us have pushed really, is to kind of zoom in a little bit into Latin America.
So Latin America is a massive place. It's like, I don't know, like five or 600 million people, 22 countries.
However, from the outside looking in, my experience, at least has been when I speak to people who are not really that familiar with Latin America is like, you know, kind of like one big homogenous place, you know, they think like, no tacos and drug lords, which so part of things we wanted to do with our activities is try to zoom in and try to expose the diversity and the richness of Latin American culture beyond what you normally see outside of it.
So we've had a like a big set of activities. So, for example, we got Cinco de Mayo, which is a Mexican holiday, very popular, actually in the United States, I think it's actually more popular in the US than it is in Mexico.
So it's only really celebrated in one part of Mexico. So we did, for example, a quiz about, you know, different trivia about Latin America, the Latin American countries, where people could have a chance to win vouchers for a Latin American restaurant like here in London.
There was also a panel, we've had a few panels in the past where we speak a lot about, you know, the idiosyncrasy of each Latin American country that we're from.
It's always like a lot of people from like I participated in one of them.
And there's also we got colleagues that are from, you know, Mexico, Puerto Rico, you know, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, all over the country, all over the continent.
So, you know, we speak about different, it's a little bit interesting, because it's a little bit about all the commonalities and why, for example, if we like I as a Latin American person, I run into somebody from Latin America, in a faraway country, it's very easy to bond, because we have a lot of like common ground.
But at the same time, there's a lot of differences, right, we want to expose and by differences, I mean, differences in a good way, right?
Just like like a rich, vibrant, diverse culture.
So that's the sort of things we wanted to expose.
There's also things like, for example, we, for Cinco de Mayo, we actually published a playlist of Latin American music.
And again, it's to like, you know, show a little bit the difference of Latin American music, because people like, they'll think about that.
And they'll think, you know, maybe salsa. And but there's a lot more to that than just like, which is, you know, that's a great genre.
But there's a lot more to Latin American music than that. And there's also a few more informal spaces.
So we had the cafecitos a while ago, which we are reintroducing now, which are like short spaces, like every other week, I believe, 15 to 30 minutes where you can just join.
And, you know, one zoom call and just, you know, chat about anything, really.
So sometimes we will have a topic that we want to discuss, again, very lightly, it's not meant to be a panel or a dissertation or anything just like talk about like, you know, we're close to Christmas time.
So all the different dishes that we eat in countries, like what are the traditions, like some countries celebrate Christmas Eve more than celebrate Christmas.
And what do we do there, like on each occasion.
So we're reintroducing those because yeah, they prove to be like a great space to kind of like wind down a little bit during the day, but at the same time, have a chat and chance to chat with people from this part of the world.
So yeah, overall, that's kind of like what we try to do.
And oh, I was on another thing before I forget, it's like we were also starting to partner with ERGs from other companies, other tech companies here in London.
So that's kind of like just getting started. But yeah, we've been trying to like do some maybe some activities between like so we can share and do some like bigger panels, for example, where people from all those companies could join maybe a public one.
We don't know. But yeah, those are in the works.
But yeah, it's it's fascinating that you actually talked about Cinco de Mayo, because I actually first started hearing about Cinco de Mayo through watching boxing, because I'm a big boxing fan.
And for some reason, Floyd Mayweather, when he was still active, he would always choose to have one of his fights around Cinco de Mayo, even though he's not even Mexican.
Yeah, it's quite random.
But, you know, just before we let you go, Guido, could you share a little bit about what Cinco de Mayo actually is celebrating?
Yeah, it was. It's a battle between Mexico and I think the French army back in the early 1800s, I believe.
It's just funny that you mentioned that, you know, I think one of the things that kind of like gave me the idea of talk so much about like diversity of our countries is like, I think it was once in a restaurant in when I lived in Prague and they had like Cinco de Mayo themed dishes.
And the waiter tried to explain to us that Cinco de Mayo is like this massive festival or celebration all over Latin America.
And we wanted to explain that it's actually not that really that we got like, you know, a well actually type of moment where, you know, he tried to explain to us like what it was like.
So I kind of felt like he probably doesn't mean anything bad about it, but there's a lot of, you know, we can do about, you know, give people a broader, like a better sense of like what Latin America is and like what the diversity and richness of the region is.
Yeah, that's really fascinating. Thanks so much, Guido. And last but not least, we have Omer, who is also part of two ERGs, one of which is Proud Flair.
And you need to get yourself one of these t-shirts, Omer. I want it for the laundry.
Fair enough. So you're part of Proud Flair and also Judeo Flair. Tell us a bit about those two ERGs.
Okay, so similar to all the other ERGs, it's a place for the two communities to just support each other, celebrate and be there for one another.
So for the Judeo Flair, we're planning some activities for the next International Holocaust Day.
So, you know, to educate and to remember. And for the Proud Flair, we're actually now planning a virtual pride parade.
So the pride parades around the world were mostly cancelled in most places, including, for instance, Tel Aviv.
And so we have a committee of over 20 people, and we're planning a lot of virtual events.
So we're going to be launching a book club discussion.
The book that we chose is Loveless. This is by Alice Oseman. She's an English writer.
The book itself is about asexuality, about a girl that doesn't understand why she doesn't want to kiss, doesn't have crushes like her friend, doesn't want to date.
And so it's a funny, heartwarming book about her journey of understanding that it's okay to be aromantic or asexual.
And then we're also going to have...
Before you go on there, Omer, for myself and anybody else who's watching who doesn't know what asexuality means, could you break that down for us?
Yeah, of course. It's a person that doesn't have crushes or doesn't want any romance, is not interested in men and female or any other type of, you know, the spectrum, just doesn't have those types of feelings.
Okay.
And you also, before I interrupt you, apologies there, but you also talked about the Holocaust Memorial is coming up.
I believe that's next month, isn't it? Oh, no, no, no.
We have time. It's in January. Last month was the Israeli one. And yeah, in January, we're planning some activities.
So we have time, but it's on the road now.
Got it. Okay. And what are some of the things that Judeo Flare has been doing sort of internally in Cloudflare as a group?
So we support each other.
Right now, because of COVID, it hasn't been too much active, unfortunately.
I've been chatting with Project Galileo to see if we can extend Project Galileo to Holocaust Memorial websites and stuff like that.
So hopefully, that's something that we will be introducing or announcing in January.
Yeah, fabulous.
And is there any, you know, any additional, you know, things that you'll be doing as part of Pride Flare this year that you might be looking forward to that we should look out for?
Yeah. So first of all, during June, we're going to be basically taking over Cloudflare TV with a lot of sessions, panels and discussions.
We're also going to be having a Pride shoe decoration workshop where we kind of decorate sneakers and stuff like that.
And also a drag sangria event where we will have drag queens teaching us how to make delicious sangrias, both alcoholic and non -alcoholic.
And we've also started relaunching the face-to-face meetups.
So that's also been pretty fun. Alina seemed pretty excited about the sangrias.
So I have a feeling you might be seeing her there.
And Harriet, too. Yeah, well, yeah, I think that's really insightful, Omer. Thank you for sharing.
So we're out of time. We were actually already out of time about 15 minutes ago, but we got our time extended because 30 minutes was not enough to go through all these amazing ERGs and the amazing work that you're all doing.
So I wanted to thank you, everybody on this panel, for taking time to share your experiences.
Thanks to all the viewers who've taken time out of your day to watch.
And hopefully you've learned something more about Cloudflare. If anybody would be interested in learning more about any of these ERGs, feel free to reach out to any of these panelists on LinkedIn.
We should be pretty easy to find.
And we wish you all a great day. Thank you for watching. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Thank you. Bye. Bye.
Bye.
From a security point of view, we use more or less all the products and features that Cloudflare has.
Cloudflare today plays the first level of defense for us. One of the most interesting and aha moments was when we actually got a DDoS, and we were seeing traffic burst up to 50 gigabits per second, 50 GB per second.
Usually, we would go into panic mode and get downtime.
But then all we got was an alert, and then we just checked it out, and then we didn't have to do anything.
We just sat there, looked at the traffic peak, and then being controlled.
It just took less than a minute for Cloudflare to kind of start blocking that traffic.
Without Cloudflare, we wouldn't have been able to easily manage this because even our data center level, that's the kind of pipe, you know, is not easily available.
We started for Cloudflare for security, and I think that was the aha moment.
We actually get more sleep now because a lot of the operational overhead is reduced.
With the attack safely mitigated, BookMyShow found more ways to harness Cloudflare for better security, performance, and operational efficiency.
Once we came on board on the platform, we started seeing the advantage of the other functionalities and features.
It was really, really easy to implement HTTP2 when we decided to move towards that.
Cloudflare Workers, which is the, you know, computing at the edge, we can move that business logic that we have written custom for our applications at the Cloudflare edge level.
One of the most interesting things we liked about Cloudflare was everything can be done by the API, which makes almost zero manual work.
That helps my team a lot because they don't really have to worry about what they're running because they can see, they can run the test, and then they know they're not going to break anything.
Our teams have been able to manage Cloudflare on their own for more or less anything and everything.
Cloudflare also empowers BookMyShow to manage its traffic across a complex, highly performant global infrastructure.
We are running on not only hybrid, we are running on hybrid and multi -cloud strategy.
Cloudflare is the entry point for our customers. Whether it is a cloud in the backend or it is our own data center in the backend, Cloudflare is always the first point of contact.
We do load balancing as well as we have multiple data centers running.
Data center selection happens on Cloudflare. It also gives us fine-grained control on how much traffic we can push to which data center, depending upon what, you know, is happening in that data center and what is the capacity of the data center.
We believe that, you know, our applications and our data centers should be closest to the customers.
Cloudflare just provides us the right tools to do that.
With Cloudflare, BookMyShow has been able to improve its security, performance, reliability, and operational efficiency.
With customers like BookMyShow and over 20 million other domains that trust Cloudflare with their security and performance, we're making the Internet fast, secure, and reliable for everyone.
Cloudflare, helping build a better Internet.
This video will walk you through how to export access logs to a third-party SIEM and security intelligence platform using LogPush.
For this demo, we'll use an active Cloudflare domain with access enabled and a pre-configured Google Cloud Storage account.
To learn more about how to configure Cloudflare access, please visit the developer documentation at developers.Cloudflare.com backslash access.
The first step to exporting your Cloudflare access logs is to log into Cloudflare and choose an active domain that has Cloudflare access enabled.
After logging in, navigate to the Analytics app in the Cloudflare dashboard, then click the Logs tab.
Here, you can set jobs to push your logs outside of Cloudflare's platform.
Cloudflare supports different destinations, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Sumo Logic, and Microsoft Azure.
For this demo, we'll use Google Cloud Storage.
After choosing your preferred service, which in this case is Google Cloud, click Next to configure the bucket path.
The first step is to name the bucket.
This name should be consistent with the bucket name in Google Cloud. The next step is to define a subfolder for Cloudflare to push your logs.
You have the option to set daily subfolders, so let's choose Yes.
Cloudflare pushes the logs to dated subfolders, so it's very important to set the bucket permission to allow Cloudflare to push logs.
Now that the bucket path is defined, you need to set the route.
Copy the IAM user listed here. Now you need to head to Google Cloud Storage to add that user.
Navigate to Google Cloud Storage, click Add Members, and paste the user from Cloudflare into the new member field.
Select the Storage Object Admin role, which gives full control of Google Cloud Storage objects.
Click Save to complete.
Now we need to head back to the Log Push configuration in the Cloudflare dashboard and validate the access.
Click Validate Access. When clicked, Cloudflare sends a test file to your destination to validate the access and prove ownership.
Now let's go back to Google Cloud.
Click Objects. Here you see a new folder created with today's date.
Click the folder, and you should see the test file from Cloudflare.
Click the file, then the link URL, and copy paste the ownership token into the Log Push configuration within the Cloudflare dashboard.
Then click Prove Ownership.
Now that the ownership has been validated, you need to choose a dataset.
I'm going to select the HTTP requests. You'll see a list of fields to add to the logs, including cache, performance metrics, firewall, etc.
For now, I'll choose the default selection. If you click Advanced Settings, you'll see that you can set the timestamp format or choose to only send a random sample percentage of your logs to decrease the log value.
Let's stick with the defaults and click Save and Start Pushing to complete the Log Push configuration.
Now that the Log Push configuration is complete, I need to use the Log Push API to import the data fields from Cloudflare to the Google Cloud Platform.
For this, we'll use Plus9, an API client, that eases the work of doing API manipulation.
The first step is to get the ID of the job I've just created.
To do this, run the following API request.
After sending the request to the API, you'll see the job ID.
The second step is to update that job with the job ID from the previous API request.
Take the job ID, add it to the end of the following API request, and change the request to a PUT.
After clicking Send, the same Log Push fields that you configured in the Cloudflare dashboard will be added to the Google Cloud Platform with the request headers at the end.
After sending the request, confirm that there are no errors, the job has been updated with the same ID, and the fields list is available, including the request headers.
Now that the job has been updated, let's check the bucket for the logs.
You should see the authenticated user aligned with the request.
After reviewing, you'll see that for all of the requests, there are specific fields and request headers with the cf-access -users, which gives a list of authenticated users that have been granted access to the applications.
This concludes the video walkthrough on how to export access logs to a third-party SIEM and security intelligence platform using Log Push.
If you have any questions or want to use Access to secure other applications or resources, visit teams.Cloudflare.com backslash access.
Like many other retailers in the industry, Falabella is in the midst of a digital transformation to evolve their business culture to maintain their competitive advantage and to better serve their customers.
Cloudflare was an important step towards not only accelerating their website properties, but also increasing their organization's operational efficiencies and agility.
So I think we were looking at better agility, better response time in terms of support, better operational capabilities.
Earlier, for a cache purge, it used to take around two hours.
Today, it takes around 20 milliseconds, 30 milliseconds to do a cache purge.
The homepage loads faster. Your first view is much faster. It's fast.
Cloudflare plays an important role in safeguarding customer information and improving the efficiencies of all of their web properties.
With customers like Falabella and over 10 million other domains that trust Cloudflare with their security and performance, we're making the Internet fast, secure, and reliable for everyone.
Cloudflare. Helping build a better Internet. Cloudflare.
Cloudflare.
Cloudflare.
Cloudflare.
Cloudflare.