Trending Stories: Building cyber resilience amidst complexity

This month, the most read and fastest trending stories from theNET were Number one, regain control of complex network environments. In this article, CSO Grant Bourzikas discusses how the disappearance of the network edge, increasing user expectations, the expanding attack surface, and the sophistication of threats means enterprises must operate in domains they no longer exercise control over. Grant suggests that budget alone won't solve this loss in visibility and control. Rather, consolidation and connectivity will play a key role in a secure future. Number two, protecting data from AI. AI has enabled organizations to build and enhance applications at an impressive speed and scale. When using AI without an understanding of the limitations and risk it presents, these tools can not only hamper the development process, but also cause harm to the organizations using them. Number three, transform cybersecurity in the boardroom. CTO John Engates lists six things the board of directors wants you to know about cybersecurity. Rising cyber attacks, geopolitics, and digital transformation are driving the board to seek an understanding of how cyber tactics ladder up to business strategy and shareholder value. For more insights for the digital enterprise, subscribe to The Net at Cloudflare.com. We were looking for a provider or a solution that is helping us to provide the scalability and flexibility that we need, especially during times of peak traffic. We choose Cloudflare because Cloudflare has many points of presence in Europe. We wanted to have the software run as close to the customer as possible. The biggest benefits of workers are their flexibility. We can use them in many different scenarios. We can use them for back-end work. We can use them for scheduled tasks. And we can just serve any amount of data to the customer without having any limitations. There are some studies that the conversion ratio basically doubles for every 100 milliseconds you are saving. Our goal was to have sub-100 milliseconds response time for all pages in our online shop. And with the KV storage, we can achieve this goal. If there wasn't Cloudflare, we would still have problems in terms of Black Friday. I remember a situation where we saw suspicious traffic on our web shop that we couldn't handle with page rules alone. I could just call the account team, tell them our problem, and they were able to activate the feature within one or two hours. That's basically impossible with any other provider. Cloudflare is a cutting-edge platform that solves many of the problems that we've seen in the past in terms of scalability. Genuine Parts Company has 53,000 employees worldwide. Primarily, we have two lines of business, aftermarket automotive replacement parts and industrial aftermarket replacement parts. We're a Fortune 200 company doing about $20 billion of revenue a year. Some of the biggest security challenges we face today is really around attack surface management. GPC has over 900 websites protected by Cloudflare today globally. Our busiest website gets approximately two and a half billion requests a month. It is hit by approximately 57 million threats each and every month. And each and every month, Cloudflare protects against all 57 million. Cloudflare and the Security Insights technology is allowing me to see what's happening across all of our digital footprint. We did have a competitor product, but we were in the dark. There's a peace of mind that we can say we have the visibility and we know, but then to be able to say we can tell you 450 million threats were thwarted by Cloudflare, each and every one of those could have been a really, really bad day. In selecting Cloudflare, we selected them with the knowledge that they had multiple areas that we could expand into. So the more that we can put with a single provider, the more we can centralize and orchestrate. I don't have to go to four different places to get an idea of zero trust versus what's going on with my apps versus what's going on with my APIs. The consolidation is real. The strategy is real. We're executing on it. I'm not necessarily interested in working with a vendor where that's all they're trying to sell me, where I only ever hear from them on a renewal. What I need are people to help me solve problems, and Cloudflare has been there along the way to help us solve our web problems. This month, the most read and fastest trending stories from the net were, Number one, regain control of complex network environments. In this article, CSO Grant Borzykus discusses how the disappearance of the network edge, increasing user expectations, the expanding attack surface, and the sophistication of threats means enterprises must operate in domains they no longer exercise control over. Grant suggests that budget alone won't solve this loss in visibility and control. Rather, consolidation and connectivity will play a key role in a secure future. Number two, protecting data from AI. AI has enabled organizations to build and enhance applications at an impressive speed and scale. When using AI without an understanding of the limitations and risk it presents, these tools can not only hamper the development process, but also cause harm to the organizations using them. Number three, transform cybersecurity in the boardroom. CTO John Engates lists six things the board of directors wants you to know about cybersecurity. Rising cyber attacks, geopolitics, and digital transformation are driving the board to seek an understanding of how cyber tactics ladder up to business strategy and shareholder value. For more insights for the digital enterprise, subscribe to The Net at Cloudflare.com slash the dash net. Polestar has a pretty unique take on how you buy a car. It's like a museum that really aids you in understanding Polestar's brand as a product, as a concept, and getting extremely rich hands -on experience. The China market is one of our absolute key markets. So you got into the space and you went to the huge touchscreen and you could feel, you know, all the materials. But things would not work. It was too slow. Certain pages were unresponsive or slow or laggy. And the overall customer experience when you're trying to configure a car was being hampered and impacting customers if they should buy a car or not. Moving over to Cloudflare, it was just one of those things that just worked. We saw immediate improvement in application performance within the showrooms. That has been very appreciated, both from customers interacting with our products, but also from the people working in spaces and in China. The overall experience working with Cloudflare has been nothing short from perfect. It's natively understood by all developers, and there's no extra need for someone to onboard to get to know the product before they can be productive. I'm super satisfied with the commitment to continuously innovate on, you know, each other's kind of core ideas when it comes to performance and security on Cloudflare end, and for us to deliver immensely positive experiences to our end users. NCR is a company that's got a long history of innovation in retail and hospitality and banking. NCR has a customer-first approach to business, and we really focus hard on making sure that our customers have what they need to be successful. We are automating the restaurants, the retail store, and the bank from end to end. I think information security is a really critical component of a company's success, and it has become more critical as more transactions have moved online to make sure that we combat the fraud and attacks that we see in the industry. What was really attractive about Cloudflare was that it provided really sophisticated controls against these kinds of attacks, but did so in the cloud. So the security team wasn't responsible for managing infrastructure, and they were able to focus on doing higher-value security work. One of the biggest threats right now in the industry is the DDoS, which reduces the availability of the site. Then that's loss of revenue for customers, right? What Cloudflare does for us is block the DDoS at the perimeter level. We were able to prevent almost 80 to 90 percent of the brute force attack using Cloudflare. There's credential stuffing attacks where attackers try and guess their way into a consumer's account. Also, credit card tumbling and other forms of online transaction fraud. If they try the same card number X number of times in, you know, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, we stopped it right away using Cloudflare, writing the workers rule. That was a very big, big thing, trying to stop fraud. Cloudflare was probably one of the easiest decisions that we ever made, and it's been a great partnership. It's been a pleasure and a very great experience working with Cloudflare. This month, the most read and fastest trending stories from the net were, number one, regain control of complex network environments. In this article, CSO Grant Borzykus discusses how the disappearance of the network edge, increasing user expectations, the expanding attack surface and the sophistication of threats means enterprises must operate in domains they no longer exercise control over. Grant suggests that budget alone won't solve this loss in visibility and control. Rather, consolidation and connectivity will play a key role in a secure future. Number two, protecting data from AI. AI has enabled organizations to build and enhance applications at an impressive speed and scale. When using AI without an understanding of the limitations and risk it presents, these tools can not only hamper the development process, but also cause harm to the organizations using them. Number three, transform cybersecurity in the boardroom. CTO John Engates lists six things the board of directors wants you to know about cybersecurity. Rising cyber attacks, geopolitics and digital transformation are driving the board to seek an understanding of how cyber tactics ladder up to business strategy and shareholder value. For more insights for the digital enterprise, subscribe to the net at Cloudflare.com slash the dash net. I'm Alessandro and I work at Canva. And Canva is a digital design and communication platform used by our community and a wide variety of different companies. We currently have about 1500 active users from internally and then about 400 users from a contractor perspective. All of them using not just access, but also various other Zero Trust product components. The landscape has shifted from a centralized location to a much more distributed global workforce. Cloudflare access allows us to quite simply define policies and rules to affect and manage that large populace of employees. Not only does it provide some extra assurance and peace of mind that there is an additional layer at your edge protecting your origin servers, it also makes sure that we can define who has access to systems and all those other bells and whistles. So when we speak to the Zero Trust product that Cloudflare provides, it's really an end to end solution. It's really enabled Canva to grow faster and provide capability at a distributed scale. So what's next is really doubling down on some of that zero trust, really enabling and fostering an environment of transparent security with a really fine grained access control model. PhonePe is a fintech company based in India that is anchored on payments. We have around 400 million registered users today on PhonePe and around two to three billion dollars flows through our network on a daily basis. My name is Barzan Engineer. I'm the chief reliability officer and co-founder of PhonePe. Cloudflare has invested in India on the ground and working with that team and growing together is a symbiotic relationship. Today on Cloudflare, we service around 300,000 requests per second, close to 775 billion requests in a month. Without the Cloudflare layer, I would be looking at at least having an infrastructure that is 10x of what it is right now, just to keep up with that load. That doesn't even solve the problem of it still might not give the best experience to the user because all the requests are funneling back to source rather than being serviced from different locations. In terms of threat mitigation, which is for our primary dynamic endpoint C, as a fintech company, all we have is a reputation. A user has to feel safe, secure when he's transacting because it's his money. He's worked hard for it. He wants a warm, fuzzy feeling around it. Our web application firewall at Cloudflare on a monthly basis is stopping around 180 million threats, which helps our reputation. It helps our users because you're only as good as what your user feels about you, right? Once you have lost that trust, it's very difficult to get it back. To me, Cloudflare is a true partner. We are in this together. We have grown together, and we continue to grow together. So it's been a very prolific relationship for both parties, and I hope it continues. We are a food-at-work company. We know the value of Zero Trust architectures, but we also know the incredible difficulty it is. So I know the only way I have a chance of implementing this well, that's scalable, that can support itself over time, is having the right partners. And so I'm so excited to have Cloudflare as a security partner because they're able to give me that toolset to do Zero Trust well. My name is Connor Sherman. I'm the head of security for EasyCator. When you want to feed a workforce of people, we are the go -to shop to making sure you've got everything you need. It's my job to make sure anywhere you are in the world, you can safely log into our internal toolset. There's a lot of inherent risk with the traditional VPN structure. Part of the success of Access for us is we were able to just bypass all that analysis, and it was so easy just to get it going, that we were able to save having to hire a specialized person to focus on VPNs. As we are a marketplace, we have all these challenges, whether it be account takeovers, scraping, bot activity. So being able to have risk ratings based on who's arriving at that login page really helped us remove things that were clearly bots and then focus on dealing with more sophisticated attacks. Bot management was a bit of a godsend for us. It gave us a level of precision where we could show up with a scalpel, where historically we'd show up with a sledgehammer. We block over 1.5 million attacks a day through Cloudflare, web application firewall, and bot management. If EasyCator didn't have Cloudflare, we'd have a very bad day. This month, the most read and fastest trending stories from the net were, number one, regain control of complex network environments. In this article, CSO Grant Borzykus discusses how the disappearance of the network edge, increasing user expectations, the expanding attack surface, and the sophistication of threats means enterprises must operate in domains they no longer exercise control over. Grant suggests that budget alone won't solve this loss in visibility and control. Rather, consolidation and connectivity will play a key role in a secure future. Number two, protecting data from AI. AI has enabled organizations to build and enhance applications at an impressive speed and scale. When using AI without an understanding of the limitations and risk it presents, these tools can not only hamper the development process, but also cause harm to the organizations using them. Number three, transform cybersecurity in the boardroom. CTO John Engates lists six things the board of directors wants you to know about cybersecurity. Rising cyber attacks, geopolitics, and digital transformation are driving the board to seek an understanding of how cyber tactics ladder up to business strategy and shareholder value. For more insights for the digital enterprise, subscribe to The Net at Cloudflare.com slash the-net. The biggest IT priorities in the state of Arizona really are focusing on modernization of legacy applications and technologies and bringing together and delivering better digital services to our citizens. As a government entity, we face a tremendous amount of cyber interest from around the world. We have to guard our systems against a lot of different things. We're running a program that we're calling the Statewide Cyber Readiness Program, essentially providing cyber protections to all of our local government entities, including cities, counties, K-12 school districts, trying to help them up-level themselves to prevent cyber attacks across the entire state. Most of the organizations that we work with, especially talking about some of the smaller entities, don't have dedicated full-time cybersecurity professionals or IT staff. One of the things we looked at is what is the ease of deployment for these tools? And Cloudflare stands out above a lot of the others, especially in that it doesn't require any sort of deployment in your environment. It's all just a quick DNS change. And usually we've seen with onboarding and deployment within half an hour to a couple of hours at the very most for some of our more complicated entities. We're getting very high-powered, very technical cybersecurity detections and protections with this platform with essentially little to no effort to deploy them. With the Arizona Cyber Readiness Program, we were able to get access to all the feature sets with Cloudflare, including the web application firewall, bot management, rate limiting, caching, while the website stays online. Maricopa County is the fourth-largest county in the United States. We're about half the population of Arizona, and we're the second-largest voting district next only to LA County. Leading up to the 2020 general election, I was really concerned about implementing as many possible security controls as we could to protect our systems. With Cloudflare, if we need to block an attack, it is trivial. Within 60 seconds, I can block an attacking IP. I see Cloudflare as a critical partner in everything we're trying to do across the state. An attack against one of us is an attack against all of us, and the only way that we can be truly successful is by looking out for each other. Cloudflare is going to be an integral part of that. It's part of our readiness program, going to be right at the edge, guarding and watching all the traffic that's coming through to hit all of those services. And so it's going to be providing critical, front-end work to make sure that our citizens are protected. Flow is the number one health and fitness application in the world. We have 250 millions of users around the world in every city in every country. It looks like a very simple app, but in reality, it's much more than just a cycle prediction app. We have information about pregnancy. We have information about how to conceive. We have different video courses, reminders about pills and ventilation, and users use this to live a better life. We also collect a lot of different signals about the human body, and we use this data to show personalized insights into health and well-being of users. Here at Flow, we use almost all products from Cloudflare. We have workers, we have CDN, we have video stream, we have Zero Trust, we have Area 1 to protect from phishing. It's very convenient when you don't need to deal with a lot of different vendors and you have everything in one place. And also, all these products, they integrate together. Most of our employees, they deal with sensitive data. We have a lot of workers who work remotely completely 100% of the time. For that, we decided to onboard Zero Trust solution from Cloudflare because it's very simple for end-users. With Zero Trust, we have much more control over network, what's going on on every computer of our employees, and we can protect those endpoints. When we learned about Rogue vs. Wait case, we decided that we need to prioritize privacy and we need to act fast. It's very hard to be completely anonymous on the Internet because there are a lot of technical identifiers with every request, and we started working on this new feature which is called Anonymous Mod. The whole idea is to de-identify all data that we store on our server. We worked with an amazing team of Cloudflare experts to deliver this experience to our users. All Cloudflare products are designed with security and privacy in mind. We don't need to worry about data, we don't need to think how they will use this data. I think we will work with Cloudflare together to make sure that in the future, everything will be private by default because privacy is a fundamental right of any human in the world. This month, the most read and fastest trending stories from the net were, number one, regain control of complex network environments. In this article, CSO Grant Borzykus discusses how the disappearance of the network edge, increasing user expectations, the expanding attack surface, and the sophistication of threats means enterprises must operate in domains they no longer exercise control over. Grant suggests that budget alone won't solve this loss in visibility and control. Rather, consolidation and connectivity will play a key role in a secure future. Number two, protecting data from AI. AI has enabled organizations to build and enhance applications at an impressive speed and scale. When using AI without an understanding of the limitations and risk it presents, these tools can not only hamper the development process, but also cause harm to the organizations using them. Number three, transform cybersecurity in the boardroom. CTO John Engates lists six things the board of directors wants you know about cybersecurity. Rising cyber attacks, geopolitics, and digital transformation are driving the board to seek an understanding of how cyber tactics ladder up to business strategy and shareholder value. For more insights for the digital enterprise, subscribe to The Net at Cloudflare.com slash the dash net. Sage Group is a leading technology company that helps businesses to thrive. We have a global footprint. We service millions of customers, entrepreneurs worldwide. The key security challenges in the industry in cybersecurity, they have been about the uprise of criminal groups. They are becoming more professional with more capabilities, which is causing the companies to have to respond to those threats. Cloudflare has a number of solutions available for a technologist, so it acts almost like a Swiss army knife. Cloudflare bot management provides is the ability of identifying what's human traffic versus automated traffic. It reduces a significant amount of concern around web scraping, around multiple automated attacks that people could launch against your website. Cloudflare Workers, it's a powerful way for you to delegate the computes to the edge, and that has brought immense flexibility for our engineering teams. One of the great things about Cloudflare and how it differentiates itself from other vendors is the Cloudflare Zero Trust approach. In many cases with other vendors, most likely you'd have to overlay those capabilities like reverse proxy, linked to a web application firewall, linked to logging and analytics. While with Cloudflare Zero Trust, many of those capabilities are already kind of baked together for you, which means that you don't have to add complexity to your environment. Sage and Cloudflare, we have a long history, but our relationship become much stronger over time. Cloudflare has this amazing ability to kind of create capabilities that speaks to the operations team, but also speaks to the security profession, and not many companies can achieve that. Q2's customers love our ability to innovate quickly and deliver what was traditionally very static old-school banking applications into more modern technologies and integrations in the marketplace. Our customers are banks, credit unions, and fintech clients. We really focus on providing end-to-end solutions for the account holders throughout the course of their financial lives. Our availability is super important to our customers here at Q2. Even one minute of downtime can have an economic impact, so we specifically chose Cloudflare for their Magic Transit solution because it offered a way for us to displace legacy vendors in the Layer 3 and Layer 4 space, but also extend Layer 7 services to some of our cloud native products and more traditional infrastructure. I think one of the things that separates Magic Transit from some of the legacy solutions that we had leveraged in the past is the ability to manage policy from a single place. What I love about Cloudflare for Q2 is it allows us to get 10 times the coverage as we previously could with legacy technologies. I think one of the many benefits of Cloudflare is just how quickly the solution allows us to scale and deliver solutions across multiple platforms. My favorite thing about Cloudflare is that they keep development solutions and products. They keep providing solutions. They keep investing in technology. They keep making the Internet safe. Security has always been looked at as a friction point, but I feel like with Cloudflare it doesn't need to be. You can deliver innovation quickly, but also have those innovative solutions be secure. All right.