The Future of E-Societies & How E-Stonia's Leading the Way

busy music When we launched Cloudflare initially, we were amazed at how international the service was right from the beginning and we looked out to see what countries were responsible and disproportionately signing up and one of the sort of mysteries to us was that from the very beginning one of the places that on a per capita basis we were the most popular in the world was Estonia and I didn't at the time know a lot about Estonia but we just saw over time more and more and more of the citizens of the country signing up to use our service and what is really amazing is that that's indicative of what Estonia has built where today they are the most digital nation in the entire world and I think a lot of that almost the the the person who really inspired that for the country was our our next guest here on stage President Tomas Hendrik Ives is is is a really unique head of state and for this audience I think it can really be summed up in one sentence which is he's a head of state he's a president of the country who's actually a coder and so I which is I mean we we certainly need more of that and so I it's a great honor to welcome him here and talk about what he's been doing in Estonia and how they have become the first truly digital nation so President Ives great to meet you thank you so before we get started talking about Estonia as a digital nation tell me just just for those of people in the audience that don't know a lot of Estonia just tell us a little bit about the country and its its situation where it is okay well it's a very small country some 1.3 million people so it's small city but it's the physically the size of the Netherlands it's below Finland and Finland has always played a very important role in our development simply because we're envious and and we have Russia to the east which has always been historically always been a headache for us and then so it's a small country I don't know and well we were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 and then by the Nazis and then by the Soviet Union and we became independent 1991 and I guess part what's relevant I guess for part of this story is that back before World War two Estonian Finland we have this mutually bizarre language which we understand us them they understand us and no one else does and we ended up well then we there was having gone from being more or less the same level development there was a 13 -fold difference in GDP per capita so we're really poor and this is we ascribed all that to the Soviet Union of course which rightly so and and so we saw Finland which at that time really was one of the leading tech countries in the world with Nokia and all kinds of other stuff and so we were we wanted we one thing was clear I think to the population that we had to be we had to move ahead and that technology was one source of doing that so in Estonia gains independence from Soviet Union 1991 and we were talking upstairs about it's around that same time that the first browsers come out talk about what what how how Estonia first thought about really emphasizing technology and prioritizing it back back then okay I mean a number of things came together once at least for me from my point of view I mean one was I mean just because I had learned to program at age 13 and I did that in college too to make a little what was what were the what you remember the first computers that you were programming well the first thing I I mean I learned a via teletype basic which was hooked up to a mainframe 50 miles away in 1968 when I went I went to Colombia and there I work I had a PDP 8 you had 8k of memory which is I guess an empty empty email but that was the computer and it was about the size of one of these things here it's big and and so in order to program and you had to do it in assembler and in hexadecimal and so it's pretty that was pretty wild I mean so I did I had that background but I'm not I mean I'm no I'm no great math whiz or anything he says I could do it and I said well that's one thing that you know I think most people could learn then there was this I mean the first web browser you know mosaic came in out in 93 yep you have this feeling well we're on a level playing field I mean all of this stuff that we didn't do for 50 years because of communism I mean sort of good streets you know nice roads and all the infrastructure stuff okay that's going to take a long time to do anyway but but there is a level playing field technologically and then I guess the third thing which was influential to me was reading a very neo -ludite book that came out at the time by Jeremy Rifkin called the end of work and which he argued that computerization is really bad because there'll be no jobs I mean this is a recurring argument and recently McAfee made the same argument who's in the audience I think okay his book is much better but but the but but I read Rifkin and he brought this example of a of a Kentucky steel mill that had 10 12 ,000 employees then the Japanese bought it automatized and computerized and then they produced exactly the same amount of steel but with 120 people now from Rifkin's point of view that was terrible if you're a country as small as ours this for me this was this is the way to go we want to if you want to increase the functional size of the country then we should may and have as many things done by machine that that I mean to liberate people to do creative things so that's the kind of stuff we're that start off with and then one of the things that I pushed for was that we would get all schools online as fast as possible so by 97 all schools in my country were online the computer education part wasn't that advanced at the time now it's much better but but still you can see the effects of educational reform about 15 20 years afterwards and then you you always know 33 percent or 4 percent of the people who have access will start taking the thing apart and will and so when you well it doesn't apply to Skype which is an Estonian company or was and bought up for 8 billion but but I mean it's an example of kids who learned young and since then we have all kinds of kids who when I asked them they're no longer kids but I asked them how did you start why did you start I said well we had this program in my school with computers and I started got in trouble for making things break and so forth but but that's how it started I think a lot of people in the audience can relate to relate to that that story what so what's it like to what does it mean to be a digital nation what is what what have you done in Estonia if you're a citizen that's that's different than you know what what you see in the rest of Europe or or in a country like the United States well I mean I'll make a few strong claims here that probably will annoy people but I mean the thing I in this era and especially now after well after the office of personnel management hack and so basically I would say that you cannot have computer security based on a simple password and email basis I mean we started very early or in 1997 that that we have a we have a two-factor two-factor authentication and this does every citizen which is every citizen have have that just yet what we did what we every person living in Estonia not to be a citizen if you visit us and if you become a permanent resident you get a card with a chip on it or you can you now we also have a mobile application and so it's two-factor is independently verified by a certification center to make sure that you are you and unless you do that you're stuck with the the old New Yorker cartoon on the Internet no one knows you're a dog that's the problem that is actually the core problem for all hackings or break-ins is that no one knows are you really you but since we have this chip based system I mean the chip it could be there the chip in the card or the chip that's in your phone which is then programmed to put do part of the authentication and then I mean here it can choose anything you want I mean we chose numbers you can also choose fingerprints I read yesterday 5.6 million federal employee fingerprints had been stolen in the OPM hackings and maybe fingerprints may not in the future be the way to go but in any case so everyone has this thing and by 2002 you have this this authenticated system the real issue is putting services behind this I mean it's fine I mean I can feel very happy that I have a way of being really validated with my card but but that becomes interesting with services so what you can do as a citizen I can basically I mean safely do bank transactions you can sign legal documents you know digital signature law we have one thing we have is a digital prescription so if you're the doctor writes your prescription into the computer and then you go to any pharmacy anywhere in the country and you can get your prescription and if you want to get it renewed you don't need another piece of paper you call up your doctor and say look I just ran out and he'll go and put it in the computer people do their taxes online again this people say well we have that too but here what our system since everything is based up on this architecture that in real time companies report all of their expenses including payroll and so that when you it's time to do your own taxes it's it's all laid out there in front of you how much you made how much was deducted well I mean this includes I mean you know charitable donations everything is all there and then you end up with this number that says how much you get back or Jimmy how much you owe and then you press enter and then it's gone and then basically in a day or two the refund is in your bank account is what's been as you've digitized the nation what have been some of the surprises things that that you you didn't expect I would imagine that you know you have have all of these efficiencies turn into into a number of different benefits that maybe you didn't anticipate well I mean there are all kinds of data you can use to do research that's one thing I guess the other thing is that uh well since we have this service already one of the things we had it on to that was voting online which we do using the same system so voting participation has increased in the country what do you have it what is the what percentage of the nation votes national election 64 about one-third of the votes are cast online and the last in the last three elections has been one third and one of the interesting things because you know this is since it's e-voting is controversial as people study it and study it and and certainly what we found out is the first we've not had ten elections online I mean because you have local elections national elections European Parliament elections that that initially there were just their differences in age and party preferences now all of that's gone I mean it's basically there are no differences in the demographic voting in the traditional way or using online so that's but it has brought a lot of voters on especially if you're a small country a lot of people very mobile always traveling I mean you can vote you know I mean you don't have to fill out an absentee ballot you guys go online and vote and do it and that's so far it's been quite successful you know I think one of the things when when people talk about creating national identity cards or or doing something where the government is has this much visibility one of the concerns is always around privacy what are the some of the things that Estonia has done in order to to really ensure that that citizens have privacy there well the first thing is you you we have a law that says you own your own data so which is which is it should be a no-brainer but but it if you don't have that law then you're in trouble so that means and you can access all your own data and you also see who has tried to access your data so that I mean from for my case you know because of my job I know that I mean every day the newspapers are looking at my financial records every single day and I go okay well they're looking again you know see they haven't found anything yet but the other I would say on the whole privacy thing I think we're getting a little carried away with the confidentiality side of the issue and the real problem I would say more broadly in the future is not confidentiality of data but rather data integrity that if you if you say I mean I've typed a B blood I mean I don't really care if someone knows I type a B blood but I'm I'd be pretty annoyed if my I mean I think I might end up being quite dead if someone is in fact changed my blood type right and that sort of sums up the difference between privacy integrity is that that okay so privacy or confidentiality is about someone knowing something about you but I fear much more especially with IOT that someone may change data I mean let's keep in mind Stuxnet Stuxnet was not malware that was changing anything it was changing the inputs to a perfectly well functioning computer or a set of computers and Stuxnet then drove the computers to act rationally but the inputs were irrational and it drove these centrifuges mad now when we go when we envision a future of IOT I mean data integrity will be the key issue there no one's really gonna care about what your refrigerator is saying to something you know somewhere else but you are you should I mean that's not a privacy issue it's very much a data integrity issue what and it what is what is Estonia done in order to ensure that someone doesn't say you have you know type a blood or you know be blood how do you ensure data integrity on a system that is so digital well one you can't access it without leaving a trace so everything every acts every every time someone accesses data it it leaves a mark now I mean they're also I mean they're also timestamp things we can do on sensitive data which we do in fact we have everything is also highly encrypted I mean our data is stored at right now at a RSA 2048 given that the FBI or NSA could not crack love a bit at RSA 520 then I make the joke that we could store all our data on NSA computers but I mean we don't the other thing that is crucial is the architecture I would say which is that being we're very poor in the 90s and we and so when we were designing the system we realized that we have okay everyone has a server but we're not we're not going to build a big server to handle this and so we ended up using an enterprise service bus system that would then be that all this all servers are connected they all have their own validation or system so that they can talk to one another if you enter the system you enter a system with your with your ID two-factor and then you can go to whichever system whether you want to look at the line of registry you want to see or you want to go into your health records those are all things that you are authorized to go to see your own data but you can't see other people's data and so far it's worked so I mean the issue here is trust and if so far we have not had we have not had any incidents where someone has actually abused this then I mean this builds over time so I mean we have if we have some 300 million transactions legal transactions done using this system of the basis of the legal signature law that it is a legal transaction and so far nothing's happened I mean no one can ever say that you will never have an incident right you cannot do that I mean that all right David Humes that you don't know if the sun's gonna rise in the East tomorrow so you can say that but we have to have I mean the system is fairly strong and robust other features we have is that allow that the system the architecture allows and with the strong ID is something we call a once only law which is that the government may never ask you for any information it already has so you never have to write your address again in Estonia if you do if you're dealing with the government I mean you may have to do it with private sector anyway so the system works people are happy with it and usually they're surprised and appalled at the backwardness of other countries when they go there and on the other hand other people from other countries come there and they don't understand why we're how why it is like this and there are other things we do too I mean we've been we've covered the country with Wi-Fi I mean so it's it's all there what was the what was the role how much of this did did Estonia the the government develop forces how much did you work with I mean there are a lot of entrepreneurs in the audience that are building companies how much was the private sector involved in in building this infrastructure that has become sort of the digital nation today well I mean it was I mean there's so much back and forth between the private and the public sector and this that that you know the private sector gets an idea then they want to go to the government say well why don't we do this the government we've the government's the administration's I guess in the u.s. terminology since the early 90s have always been supportive or at worst they go whatever do what you want so the private sector in the form of banks were very much involved because they realized this was a far more secure system than the the the banking whatever Internet banking exists elsewhere so the banks were always supportive effects the bank we had a public-private initiative between the government and the banks that to teach older people to to be able to use computers because the banks interest was shutting down bank offices I mean we don't want to have all these branches and the government's interest was getting people online anyway and so then there's there's cooperative effort of teaching I'm going around in rural areas saying okay this is how this is a computer this is how you use a computer because kids learn anyway I mean kids would just they just pick it up automatically but but you want to get an older population then you need something you actually have to do more work at it and and then of course startups sort of younger people or just I mean one of the things they do they come up with ideas on what to do and new new programs or new things we can do with the with the system we have because in many ways you can do things with a very strong strong system with far smaller security concerns that would be very hard on something else and then this means that we can take off in certain areas I mean we have I mean I don't know if this one thing we have for example is we actually have I mean we do our health care online yep and so not like healthcare.gov well I mean I the problem I mean I'm just wary of a system that doesn't have a secure identity that's that's my main problem with that I mean that's I mean if it works it works but it's just as it crashes it crashes but yeah but for example what we can I mean you you can I mean traditionally you have had the doctor on a pedestal the patient is the supplicant it's been like that ever since Hippocrates while in Estonia if you don't like they say get a second opinion well in Estonia you can just authorize a different doctor to look at all your medical records and he the you authorize him and online he can then go and look at your medical records and he can give you perhaps a different opinion based on what he sees there I mean this in fact it's not yet but I predict will be hugely disruptive to medical care in the future because you have real competition there but these are things that you know we're discovering as we go along the real big thing I would say that we're only beginning to see and not that we have answers but if you think about the way societies and governments and administrations have been organized for 5,000 years is a serial process I mean one example that we saw this very clearly is I mean if you want to register a business you have to fill out all kinds of paperwork and then at least in Europe I mean you have to go show that everyone on the board has paid their taxes they are not criminals they have not gotten bankrupt so they pay their alimony I mean all this stuff has to be done so you take you fill out all these forms you go to the whatever office and it goes to like one office they look through not a criminal another offices has paid alimony there were not gone bankrupt and and then and then you end up out of the serial process the decision okay you can start the company whereas if you do what we have which is you just put these people there with their IDs with their numbers and identifying numbers all the data already exists it goes in basically in parallel and you find out almost immediately has not gone bankrupt has not committed a crime doesn't owe taxes has paid alimony and so you end up in 15 minutes getting a business registered whereas at least in one European country I know it took 18 months until recently I mean from start to finish when John on our team actually was telling me last night that he's applied to be an e-resident of Estonia what why would you mean why what is that and why why would other people in the audience want to be e-residents of Estonia well you you have access to a number of services that that exists I mean where you can you can well you do I mean you can access I mean you're gonna open a bank account you can digitally sign legal documents that at least in the European Union are valid as legal documents so we can I mean if you have to I mean the basic idea and so much business international if you have to sign a contract and you have you know one guy's in Singapore one guy's is somewhere else in the third place and then I mean otherwise you have to go around flying around sign these things or accept the facts but a a legal signature is a legal signature and it is considered a legal signature throughout the European Union anyway I mean it'd be it'd be pretty amazing if Estonia's system of identity if you were essentially the startup that solved the identity problem for for the rest of the world it's I wouldn't pretend to do that I think we have found a solution that works but the identity problem I maintain will have to be solved one way or another the current approach I mean say you know take Al Gore's analogy the information highway I mean you have a you have a billion wide billion lane highway and right now all the cars are driving on it without license plates you don't have to have a license plate I mean you can do all the things we do in Estonia aside from where an identity is necessary I mean I still go and order like an idiot books from Amazon where the only so-called security thing is a three-digit number that in the back of my on the back of my credit card I mean I don't think that's really that's it yeah but I do it anyway I mean we do all kinds of silly things I mean I have all kinds of apps that probably are being or all my data are being monetized as I sit here but if you want to have something secure then you have to have a system like this and so here I would say this is the I mean especially for all the libertarians there are cases of market failure where in fact you have to have somebody some Hobbesian sovereign that in fact takes responsibility for what's going on now you don't have to do it but if you want to have secure security and things that are important to people and just as a government is ultimately there to provide security and you know from war or to keep the streets policed so to there has to be some authority that will in fact guarantee and provide the sovereign guarantee of the security of your data this is not an issue before but it is now and that's this is where our government does this we also have I mean generally our government is taking a rather libertarian approach to everything but when it comes to securing data it is the guarantor but as I also see that objections to a an identity are so huge in certain countries that I don't see how they will this will ever take root it is kind of ironic that the five countries that are most opposed to having a national identity are the UK United States Canada New Zealand and Australia but the ironic part is that those are what they're also the five eyes right I mean the people that share that NSA shares data with so who knows why but in any case that's where we are what so so we're we're coming to the end but tell us about what you know Estonia poor country in 1992 these initiatives and schools tell us about how how has the country changed as a result of that what's the sort of the attitude of people there and and the impact how have you seen that play out and in the country over the last 20 years well yeah I mean there are many things I mean I'm Eric Schmidt says we're the ideal country and what do we do I don't know but I'm because we're a country of early adopters and every time we get some new thing everyone wants to try it certainly the people's self-confidence has increased the success of Skype which were four kids who first first did Kazaa and then after they avoided being jailed in the u.s. then went on to do voice over Internet protocol which became sort of it's inspired you know lots and lots of people to young people to see that well this is a way out there's a way to do something big and so we have a lot of very tech savvy kids so that's changed where we feel we're at what at least I feel is that problem is that the rest of Europe has not gone this route and Europe is very lagging far behind and in Europe will fall on this Europe Europe as opposed to United States we do not have in the United States I mean goods go all across the country and it's just completely normal it's true in the European Union as well you know take a bottle of wine from the Algarve and Portugal and you ship it up to Lapland it's no problem but in the United States you also have free movement of services digital services we do not have that in Europe I cannot buy an iTunes record for someone who lives next door to me if it's in another country digital services are all nationally based so we can be as tech savvy and cool as we want in Estonia it those things don't work across borders with the current level of legislation in the European Union and as long as Europe is does not solve this issue it will fall more and more behind and I think that is a fundamental problem we face in Europe and I think there's a more even more broad problem we face and I don't know who if anyone here has read this wonderful essay from 1959 by a British scientist CP snow called the two cultures and in that essay he talks about university culture not world in that he I mean he was a physical chemist who would sit around with the physicists and mathematicians at Cambridge but he was also literary novelist so then he would go over at the faculty club and drink with the with the poets and with the Shakespeare professors and he said these two tables didn't talk to each other and he was the only one well that was about a university I think in 2015 the problem is writ large across the world and we have geeks who work at NSA or they work in whatever saying oh boy look what I can do without really understanding where it fits into the sort of the sort of the Enlightenment era democratic liberal society view of things and then on the other hand you have people lawmakers who often have no idea about anything and when it comes to I mean if there's a number it's forget it I gave a talk to a bunch of parliamentarians in Europe explaining to them that the next election they will be in it will be in 4.5 years that's three iterations of Moore's law that means their computers will be two to the third times more powerful at your next election and one of them asked me what is two to the third so I'm not kidding so I mean this is what we so we have this I mean it's it's no longer universities we have society we are our societies have people who are very technically savvy people who don't understand what Thomas Jefferson was about and then we have people who maybe understand Thomas Jefferson but they don't know I mean they can't add so and this means those two worlds are going to be in greater and greater conflict well I I really appreciate you coming I know that I admire you as a as someone who's bridging those two worlds and we think it's very important to bring together both technology and policy and and what you've done in Estonia is in Estonia is remarkable and I think that there are a lot of governments around the world that that should be looking to to you and what you've done for for that so thank you so much coming and sharing the story with us here today so the the president wasn't the only politician who we reached out to to to come here and while not all of them were able to be here in person we got a what they think about the future of the Internet and so at different points throughout the day we're going to show you some of those videos and the first one which we're queuing up right now actually comes from FCC chairman Wheeler who who who I can't confirm whether or not he is in fact a dingo but he has been very vocal in in network neutrality and and the policy around that and he wanted to share a few thoughts about the FCC's role and their vision for for the future of the Internet Zendesk is one of the world's premier customer service companies providing its software suite to over 125,000 businesses around the globe. My name is Jason Smale I'm the vice president of engineering at Zendesk. My name is Andrei Balkanashvili I'm a technical lead in the foundation edge team at Zendesk. Zendesk is a customer support platform that builds beautifully simple software for companies to have a better relationship with with their own customers. We have over 125,000 businesses around the world all using Zendesk and then within those businesses there's hundreds of people whose day job is to sit in front of Zendesk and use Zendesk. For Zendesk security is paramount and when it came to safeguarding its network Zendesk turned to Cloudflare. Web security is very important to our business our customers trust us with their information and their customers information so we need to make sure that their information is safe secure. The initial need for Cloudflare came back a couple of years ago when we suddenly started to see a lot of attacks coming towards us and all of a sudden would get thousands of requests hundreds of thousands you know like millions of requests coming at us from all over the place so we needed a way to be able to control what came into our infrastructure and Cloudflare were the only ones that could meet our requirements. It's been really impressive to see how Cloudflare's DDoS mitigation continues to evolve and morph and it's definitely the best DDoS mitigation we've ever had. I think Cloudflare just gets you that and so much more and you don't have to pick and choose or and layer on all these different providers because it's just one and they're great at all of those things it's easy it's a no-brainer. By tapping into Cloudflare's unique integrated security protection and performance acceleration Zendesk has been able to leverage Cloudflare's global platform to enhance its experience for all of its customers. Cloudflare is providing an incredible service to the world right now because there's no other competitors who are close. Cloudflare is our outer edge it makes our application faster more reliable and allows us to respond to confidence to traffic spikes and make our customers happier. Zendesk is all about building the best customer experiences and Cloudflare helps us do that. With customers like Zendesk 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. Welcome to Cloudflare. You're joining millions of creators and developers building amazing digital experiences. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. How do we do this? It's simple. We're a reverse proxy that lives at the network edge. That's the place on the Internet where your website and your users connect and we built our massive network throughout the world so that it can help your customers no matter where they are. Our network helps you ensure that your sites apps and mobile experiences are optimized to be fast. At the same time we make sure you're always online by protecting against DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and data breaches. Now that you're on Cloudflare there's plenty more to explore. You can write code at the edge with workers, have lightning-fast videos with stream, or quickly add one of our hundreds of Cloudflare apps. We're always innovating and have your back so you can focus on the important things, creating delightful digital experiences. Thanks very much. It's so great to see everybody out here today. So Andy and I are going to talk about how we work with customers in the region. And first I just want to clear the air about something. Andy and I have North American accents. I can assure you we're British and we're also EU citizens still as of today. And yeah, needed to get a Brexit joke in there before we continued. So I'm just going to take you on a little evolutionary journey of Cloudflare and EMEA. Now you've seen a lot of maps today. We love using maps of our network, but this is not a data center map. The maps that I'm going to show you are our customers in the EMEA region, starting with our very first customer. So our first customer reached out to us because they were enduring a lot of attacks and they had a crucial event that they needed. And I actually can't think of a better customer that sort of epitomizes the diversity of the region than, of course, Eurovision. So we still work with Eurovision today and their solutions engineer, Stefan, was working with them just a few weeks ago mitigating attacks on Sunday, just like we do every year because everyone, of course, passionately has their supporters for the song contest. And as it sort of went by through the years, we were adding more customers. And in 2015, this is when we decided to put a team actually on the ground to deal with our enterprise customers. We wanted to be close with them, we wanted to hear from them, and we wanted to work with them more locally. At this point, or in 2016, we had less than 100 data centers. We didn't really have much of the product expanse that you see today. And then in 2017 and 2018, we were really experiencing a lot of phenomenal growth. We started getting so many more products, load balancing, rate limiting, workers. This is when we added our office in Munich as well to sort of enhance the region as well. So just at this point, I just wanted to thank you all for coming with us on this journey. It's been incredible to work with all of you and get feedback from you. You've beta tested, you've really just helped us. We can't do this without you. We've really, like, have this crazy idea of making a better Internet, and we need all of our customers. So thank you so much for participating in that with us. So here we are in 2019, and we've got almost 1,000 enterprise customers in the region. And one of the things that we do at Cloudflare for new starters is do fun facts. So I've actually got the registration list, and I've got some fun facts about everybody here today. So first of all, your cash hit ratio is 92%. This is actually really good. This is above average, so well done. So you've also...35% of you have written workers, and I think a few people were being shy earlier when John asked you to raise your hands, because this is how many of you have written workers. You also did 500 billion requests last month, which is pretty impressive. So this is how we support such a diverse and innovative team, and this is with our EMEA customer -facing team. They actually speak 29 different languages. So I'm going to talk about a couple of ways about how we work with you and how we support you. So first of all, we're your trusted advisors in your support system. If you've ever had something go critically wrong and reached out to our customer support team, you would have had an amazing empathetic response of a very skilled technical support engineer. I'm extremely proud of them. They really make our team look good. The other thing that we do is we're your trusted advisors. There's so many cool things that you can do with Cloudflare. These are just a few goals that we've heard of. We can help you into new markets. We can help you with DRM at scale. This is what our solutions engineers and customer success and customer-facing teams will help you with on a one-to-one basis and work with you on. The next thing that we do is we're your Cloudflare insiders. So what does that mean? Jen talked about a lot of different things that we're building at Cloudflare. There's so many different products, and we want to make sure that we communicate to our customers what we're doing and what we're up to. So as you innovate and plan and build your own roadmaps, you know that we're there with you. There's a few ways that we do this, whether it's business reviews or one-to -one meetings. We also do webinars, and we do a lot of meetups, maybe smaller events than this, throughout Europe and throughout the region. One of the things that I get asked by candidates in interviews about all the time is, what's the biggest challenge of working here, and what's your favorite part about working here? They're actually the same answer. The biggest challenge is that we're shipping like crazy. But that's also the best part about working here, because we're doing things that our customers want, and we're really there for them. So next, we're your voice inside Cloudflare. I've worked at a SaaS company before. It was kind of a joke. Your feature request goes into the black hole. We had a form to fill out for customer feature requests, but we literally didn't know where they went, or who dealt with them, or who even saw them, or if they were seen. But this is not the case at all at Cloudflare. And your customer-facing team really works with customers to communicate what you tell us. So an example of that is, every Friday, we collate all the feature requests that came in through the week, and it's sent out to the entire company. So 1,000 people see your feature requests every single week. And the exec team eagerly waits for this email on Fridays to learn about what our customers are saying. So another sort of quick story about that is, and we've been talking about this kind of all morning, is this feature of edge side code that we had a long time ago, where you could write code...well, actually, our solutions engineers would write code, deploy it every Wednesday. It would go to all our edge nodes and do this sort of custom logic. Now, of course, it's not scalable to have a weekly release schedule and have our solutions engineers write the code. You couldn't really see it. You know, somebody else might have written it. And so when we started documenting these feature requests, actually, our third ever feature request from a customer was...it's not written, you know, quite eloquently, but they need to be able to write and edit, tweak edge side code as a self-service. This was in 2015. So you guys, you know, these kept coming in, kept coming in. And I think you know what I'm getting at. Like, you guys helped us prioritize workers. These feature requests that you've been writing in became Cloudflare Workers. So that's an awesome thing that, you know, our customers really inspired us and pushed us to do. So again, thank you so much for sticking with us throughout this whole journey that we've been on. So the last thing I wanted to leave you with is show you my Jira picture. So if I write a Jira ticket, this is my little Bitmoji icon. The reason that it's this is because I wanted you to know that whenever you give feedback to us, if it's a bug or a feature or a capability, there's someone on the customer-facing team doing this inside Jira with our engineering and product team on your behalf to make sure that your voice is being heard. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Andy, who's going to go through with you a little bit more of the Cloudflare journey. The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, or WAF, is an OSI Layer 7 intelligent and scalable solution to secure your web applications without changing your existing infrastructure or sacrificing performance. The Cloudflare WAF protects against a large number of web attack vectors, such as file inclusion, cross -site scripting attacks, SQL injections, and many other vulnerabilities. This video will highlight key features of the Cloudflare WAF, including how to use the WAF rule sets to protect applications, create your own custom firewall rules based on your security needs, and visualize and analyze threats with the firewall analytics. Before enabling the WAF, you need to create an account and add a domain to Cloudflare. If you have a Cloudflare account, sign in, select your domain, and navigate to the Firewall app. Then, the Managed Rules tab, and toggle the WAF to on. The default WAF configuration is fine-tuned to reduce false positives to a minimum. The Cloudflare WAF contains three packages, Cloudflare Managed Rule Set, OWASP Mod Security Core Rule Set, and Custom Firewall Rules that are created and accessed through the Firewall Rules tab. Each package monitors and identifies suspicious activity for HTTP requests, and takes action based on your rule configuration. You can configure the Cloudflare and OWASP rules here in the Managed Rules tab. The Cloudflare Managed Rule Set contains security rules written and curated by Cloudflare, including rule groups for CMSs, such as Drupal and WordPress. The Cloudflare Specials group is a rule group that provides core WAF security against common attacks and zero -day vulnerabilities. After toggling the rule group to on, you can choose to use each rule's default action, or override it with your preferred action. The possible WAF actions include Disable, which turns off the rule, Simulate, which allows and logs the request in the WAF activity log, Block, which blocks the request, and Challenge, which will challenge your site's visitor with a capture challenge page. If you scroll down, you'll see the OWASP Mod Security Core Rule Set, Cloudflare's implementation of the OWASP Rule Set. Each OWASP rule that matches a request will increase the threat score for that individual request. After the request exceeds a specified threshold, the WAF will trigger your chosen action. You can configure this rule set's threshold sensitivity, High, Medium, Low, or Off, and the default action as Simulate, Challenge, or Block. Each rule group can be enabled by toggling the switch to on. Individual rules can also be turned on or off as required. Cloudflare enables DDoS protection for each application. Details on which mitigations are applied automatically can be seen in the Cloudflare DDoS Protection Card. Now, let's create a custom firewall rule. Cloudflare firewall rules allow you to construct expressions to match and filter HTTP requests and determine how the WAF should handle the matching traffic. Let's create a rule to block traffic with a specific user agent, the Pingdom bot, from accessing the homepage of our site. To create your own firewall rule, navigate to the Firewall Rules tab. Click Create a Rule, assign a name, add the Pingdom user agent, and add another criteria to match the URI equals to slash. When initially deploying the rule, you can run a test that will provide an estimate on the number of matches against historic traffic. You could also deploy the rule in log mode and monitor the analytics for some time to ensure no false positives. Once you're confident the rule is correct, you can deploy it in block or challenge mode. Now that we've created and tested our firewall rule, let's head to the Overview tab to review the firewall analytics. Details about security events are critical for monitoring and maintaining an optimal security configuration for your web application. Cloudflare firewall events allow you to better understand your threat landscape to identify, mitigate, and review attacks more effectively. Events are currently stored for up to 30 days and the dashboard can be filtered on custom time ranges from 30 minutes to up to 72 hours. You'll see a count of firewall activity per action or per Cloudflare service, details of the traffic flagged or actioned, such as IP address, user agents, or country, and an activity log that provides a list of all recent firewall events organized by date to show the action taken, details about the request, and the Cloudflare security feature that matched. After the rule that we deployed earlier has been running for some time, we can now see the rule matching in our analytics. Let's reduce the time frame to the last 30 minutes, expand the filter to show the top 10 rules, find our rule, and click filter. The dashboard is now showing data matching the rule filter only. We can see the matched user agent, the client IPs, the graph displaying the data over time, and also the ASN numbers from which the traffic is coming from. Finally, using the activity log, we can expand a single event and see all the related event details. In this demo, you've seen how to use the WAF rule sets, create your own custom firewall rule, and visualize threats with firewall analytics. Now you're ready to get started with the Cloudflare WAF. To learn more about how the Cloudflare WAF can help you protect your applications, sign up for a Cloudflare account at Cloudflare.com. We're so glad you're getting started with Cloudflare. Let's walk through our key performance enhancing features that we recommend for all our customers. Cloudflare's network puts some of your static content as close as possible to your site. Whenever you update it, we automatically store copies of certain content resources across cities worldwide. This is called caching. Then, when someone visits your site, we serve the resource from the nearest data center so it loads as quickly as possible. When you've signed up for Cloudflare, we automatically enabled caching for your site, so you should already be experiencing better performance. Click on DNS in your dashboard to make sure there's an orange cloud next to the DNS records for web traffic. Optimize delivery of your JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and images in just a few clicks using the Cloudflare speed tab. Let's explore these features. First, is to minify your website's source code for data that doesn't need to be there, like extra spaces and developer comments. With these bits removed, there are fewer to push around. We recommend you check all three boxes for JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Make your site load faster using Cloudflare's steady-the-art compression algorithm, Brotli. Compression takes data and makes it smaller without losing any information. When you enable Brotli, Cloudflare compresses your site wherever it can. Polish is a one-click performance booster for pro and business domains. It lets you compress your images with two quality options, lossless and lossy, that will improve your site's load time. Our lossless option removes some extra information about an image, also known as metadata, while keeping the essential data, enabling smaller file sizes. Lossy image compression reduces the file size of an image with an almost imperceptible loss of detail. This can lead to major bandwidth savings and load time improvements. And for sites where images aren't a main focus, your visitors likely won't notice anything except for your site's increased performance. Finally, with WebP we can automatically deliver this new state-of-the-art, highly efficient image file format to any capable browser and reduce the transmission time to the minimum possible. We recommend turning it on. It's an easy performance win. By leveraging the many features and optimizations offered by Cloudflare, you can make a big difference to your site's performance. This means you're ensuring higher conversions, improved engagement, and reduced costs. Head to your Cloudflare dashboard today to enable all these features and more. Cloudflare Stream makes streaming high -quality video at scale easy and affordable. A simple drag-and-drop interface allows you to easily upload your videos for streaming. Cloudflare Stream will automatically decide on the best video encoding format for your video files to be streamed on any device or browser. When you're ready to share your videos, click the link button and select copy. A unique URL can now be shared or published in any web browser. Your videos are delivered across Cloudflare's expansive global network and streamed to your viewers using the stream player. Stream provides embedded code for every video. You can also customize the desired default playback behavior before embedding code to your page. Once you've copied the embed code, simply add it to your page. The stream player is now embedded in your page and your video is ready to be streamed. That's it. Cloudflare Stream makes video streaming easy and affordable. Check out the pricing section to get started.