Cloudflare's Mission: To help build a better Internet

Okay, great. Thank you all for coming. It's my first time here in Tallinn, so enjoying it thus far. I'm going to tell you a bit about Cloudflare, our vision, our mission, our strategy, what we do before we go into the rest of the day. So Cloudflare, as I said, we exist for 15 years now. We have like 4,000 employees, millions of customers. We have around 5 million users of our platform, of whom are, let's say, 250,000 are actually paying customers. And I will go into that, why that is the case. And they're using us, our wide area of services and networks. Why was Cloudflare set up like 15 years ago? So at that time, around 2009, 2010, clearly it was that the cloud was happening and there was this move to SaaS with companies like Salesforce and Microsoft and clearly AWS and then followed by Google and Microsoft also moved into the infrastructure as a service, on the infrastructure layer. But on the network layer, that was a world at the time really dominated by Cisco. And then whatever was missing in Cisco's portfolio, there were specific needs providers like F5 or Checkpoint or Palo Alto coming up, filling especially around security or specific applications that Cisco was not providing, but that world was not moving to the cloud. So our founders thought like, okay, you know, that's what we need to move to. Everything is moving to the cloud. Also the network space should move to the cloud. The other thing they thought about was like, okay, if everything moves to the cloud, it needs to be one integrated architecture platform. We should not have all these different point solutions because what is actually, what does it mean moving to the cloud? It means from a network perspective, connecting applications to users, wherever the users might be and whatever the application might be. The application might be in Azure, the application might be in a private data center, the application might be with a SaaS provider and the users will sit everywhere, which we also see today, right? Especially after COVID. So then having all kinds of point solutions will lead to several issues like we have outlined here. Many vendors to manage as an IT organization, the threat landscape becomes bigger and more complex because you have different kinds of solutions that you need to manage. Also like the release of new functionality is becoming an issue because it needs to go through this patchwork of networks, which is an issue, which all leads to dissatisfaction and not reaching your business objectives, right? So it also needs to be like an integrated architecture. So that's how we looked at it. And then we have built it from the ground up, right? So our architecture, our solutions have been built from the ground up. We designed a network, the infrastructure, the software on top of it. We're not riding on any hyperscaler. We want to control the entire architecture that we made. And the idea is, as we said, like connect users to any application, wherever it is, the Internet becomes the backbone of your organization. However, the Internet was never set up to be secure or highly performant, right? The Internet was an academic project that started somewhere in the seventies. So also we want to have a network that was highly secure without a trade-off with performance and then using the Internet. And then the products that we have developed over time are basically, can be defined in three different buckets. First one is connecting. So think about your wide area network. You can run that on Cloudflare. Think about, you know, your DNS, right? So routing the traffic to the right destination. That's one thing, that's connect. The second one is of course, everything related to cyber. So protecting layer four, layer seven, the entire SSE. We have that in our portfolio. DDoS mitigation, web application firewall, that's in the protect. And then the third one, which is actually very interesting, and I will spend some time on that, is build. As we are a completely software -defined network and we are a cloud, you can write applications on our network. Actually, our network is one big globally distributed computer. So we call it a network, which is actually a big globally distributed computer on which you can write code. And with these solutions, I touched then on different digital initiatives that you see around the world. I just want to highlight a couple besides the cyber that I already touched on. Number six, or sorry, number five is very interesting, which is a solution we have. It's called data localization suite, especially imported in Europe. So we have this, as I said, this global network, but a lot of customers, especially in Europe, Germany, France, want to ensure that their data stays in the country. So whatever we route or protect needs to stay in the country. So we have a suite called data localization suite. If you go to the website where you see that, you also see that there is one specifically for NATO, which is one of our customers. So we productize for NATO that all the traffic that NATO uses from us stays within NATO countries and NATO member states. But the other benefit is number six, is since we have this breadth of solutions, you can consolidate a lot of functionality, right? On Cloudflare, you don't need to have 15 or 20 different providers to provide the functionality that we can provide. So how do we do that? As I said, it's one network, one control plane. Everything is programmable. Everything is software within Cloudflare. And we built this over the last 15 years, right? So we built, I mean, we are in 180 cities. We have many points of presence. So we are in 335 cities. We are over 120 countries. So basically everywhere where a user sits on the Internet, we are close to that point. And since we see so much on the Internet, and this brings me back to what I said in the beginning, we have on purpose from the beginning created a free tier for users. So everybody can sign up to Cloudflare for free. You can do it in like one minute. And then you can actually use lots of our services for free. Why do we do that? Because we want to get lots of users on our network so we can analyze traffic. And since we can analyze traffic, we can come up with products. We see cyber threats much sooner than maybe other providers can see because they don't have that wide range of users. And then what we can do is we can start mitigating threats on a daily basis, fully with machine learning and AI that nobody even sees coming, right? We will take care of it on a daily basis because there's so much traffic on the network. 20% of the web sits behind Cloudflare. Number two is Meta with 8%. So it just tells you a bit about the scale of what we have built. The other key architectural principle is that, as I said, we define everything from the chip, the hardware, the software. It's all designed, architected, built by Cloudflare and it runs in every location that we have with the same stack. This is very important because with that, every new functionality can really get released on our global network, right? It's not like, especially if you think about building applications, and I have a history, I used to work at AWS. If you've got something in, let's say, Virginia in the data center, it didn't mean that that functionality was also in Frankfurt or in Cape Town or in Singapore. Every region was a thing in itself. With us, the world is the region, right? Every functionality is out there globally on all those points of presence. The other thing that we bring with that is that it's all infrastructure as code. So what I see a lot happening is that customers that have a cloud operating model, so that really are on their way to bring a lot of things to the public cloud, love Cloudflare because they recognize immediately infrastructure as a code. You just have to talk to the API and it gets released. It fits into the cloud operating model. You can use Terraform. It's all automated, right? If you have a cloud operating model, you automate your operations. You don't want to have lots of people walking around managing your infrastructure. This is what comes with Cloudflare. Okay, I just want to say a couple of things about our developer suite. Also, because I'm here and I know in this part of the world, there are many developers. It's not just cyber. You can also build applications with Cloudflare. What we see is a lot of uptick around AI startups, building AI type of applications. It's not me just saying that. Just recently, I think last week or two weeks ago, this report came out from Forrester. You see our position there, just behind the hyperscalers. And what Forrester was saying is several things that are really strong with Cloudflare. One is like AI application development and also the overall user experience for developers. It's super fast and it's specifically for, this is serverless development platforms, for edge use cases. If you compare us to the hyperscalers, you don't bring your, let's say, your legacy SAP environment to Cloudflare. That's not what we set up for. We are like a network and use us for edge use cases. But we have all the functionality that you would look for in a cloud, database, storage, queuing, developer tools, analytics, API gateways. That's also all built. That's also all there. There's a lot of uptick around our developer platform as we speak. We announced, if you saw our results in Q1, we had our first hundred million plus dollar deal, was this portfolio, like with a company in the US using this portfolio. Another one that also was following, the current survey is ongoing for 2025. This is one of 2024. What do developers per stack overflow, which is, let's say, the tool that most developers look at, what is their preferred cloud platform? Of course, AWS number one, Google, Azure, number four, Cloudflare. Before a bunch of other companies like Salesforce, Snowflake, Databricks, you might not know this, right? So I just want to highlight that there's a lot of capabilities that you can have with Cloudflare. It's not just protecting your website. You can actually build your website with Cloudflare. You can take out your website provider. You can build your web service on Cloudflare. Okay. So whatever you choose, you can think about modernizing your networks, get rid of your MPLS. You don't need those SDN boxes. The network is there. You just connect to it. The one thing you can think about modernizing your apps, what I just showed you, or everything related to cybersecurity, from app security to employee security, SSD, layer seven, layer four, layer three, you can do it. There are different ways to enter. The thing I just want to leave you with is, if you just do one thing with Cloudflare, you leave a lot of value on the table, right? Once you're on the platform, you can do much more with it than just doing one single product with one of the things that we have. We have more than 70 features that you can use along these three pillars. All right. That was the story about Cloudflare Connectivity Cloud. We're now going to move to Sebastian. Okay. Thank you so much.