As Cloudflare seeks to become a leading vendor in the fast-growing zero-trust security market, it's increasingly going head-to-head with major industry players such as Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler.
“But really, who we think we're competing with over the long-term is AWS,” Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince told Protocol in a recent interview, given the way that both companies are evolving to offer a wide range of services that businesses need to operate — security services among them. The ability to procure a wide range of cloud-based services from a single vendor will be more and more crucial to customers going forward, he predicted.
Prince also discussed what he sees as Cloudflare's advantages as it looks to expand from its roots in application security and into zero trust, which has become a top priority for many enterprises looking to provide secure application access to their distributed workforce. Cloudflare told Protocol that more than 15% of its paying customer base — or, more than 23,000 customers — have now adopted at least one of its zero-trust services.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Cloudflare is known for frequently sharing some of the earliest details about major cyber incidents. How are you able to beat out the many other organizations who are also tracking this sort of thing?
At some level, all security is just data analysis. And whoever has the most data — from the most different sources — is able to most quickly spot the trends, most quickly spot threats, most quickly stay ahead of it. And so I don't think it's a surprise that when we were doing an analysis on Log4j, the earliest indications of the [vulnerability] being exploited were picked up by us. We were ahead of everyone else. Same thing was true when the Atlassian [Confluence] exploit from [early June] went around — we found the earliest instances of when it was exploited. And that's because we've got such a broad base. It's north of 20% of all of the web that sits behind us. That gives us just an unparalleled view.
In terms of your security services, what are the areas where Cloudflare wants to compete? Are there areas you don’t plan to get into?
[For securing customers today] there's a big component around identity, and we don't play in that space. There are a bunch of [companies] that do identity well, and we partner with all of them. There's a role for endpoint security and antivirus, and we don't play in that space either. But we partner with almost everyone in it.
Then between those two things, there's a role for network security. We want to play in every part of that space. That means, we want to be a forward proxy and a reverse proxy. We are actually the largest forward proxy in the world today, based on traffic. We're able to provide a huge amount of security services across that. What we want to be is the “future network” that you wish the internet had been from the beginning, when it was designed.
"At some level, all security is just data analysis."
And that means yes, providing DDoS [mitigation], providing web application firewall — but also traditional firewall services, VPN services, gateway services and access control services. And hooking those in with whomever you choose as your identity provider and whomever you choose as your endpoint security provider.
That is the direction the world is going. I think we fit the model of what Gartner calls SASE [secure access service edge] better than any other company, in terms of providing the complete set of services that they view as a complete SASE platform .
In terms of your biggest competitors in security, who would they be? Zscaler? Palo Alto Networks?
We have products that line up straight against Zscaler, Palo Alto, Imperva, Akamai. What I think is different about us is that we look further in the future, and are more ambitious, and have designed our network to be extensible and programmable.
Palo Alto will always [be] at a disadvantage to either us or Zscaler over the long-term. I think that you really do need to know how to run the network yourself, in order to get the performance and pricing that we're able to [offer]. It's very difficult to build a cloud service on top of somebody else's cloud. I think you need to run it yourself.
We have been competing with Zscaler around the edges for quite some time. I think you can be bullish on them and bullish on us. There's a lot of Cisco VPNs to replace out there, a lot of Cisco firewalls. I think that for both of us, that's the primary focus. But I think what we have really seen in the last six months is that we are getting pulled into more and more deals.
How does your recent launch of a partner program factor into your competitive efforts in zero-trust services?
I think the way we have gone to market traditionally is different than [Zscaler]. We tend to be very practitioner-led. And we tend to land with one solution and then expand that solution over time. They tend to be much more systems integrator- or partner-led, and they tend to land with a much broader initial solution upfront.
I think that the right answer is, you should be able to do both. And so, when we recently announced our channel program, of the top 20 Zscaler partners, half of them are now Cloudflare partners as well. Now you will see us in many more of those deals that come through system integrators and partners, which is a bit of a newer skill for us. What will continue to be the case is [our emphasis on] practitioner-led [deals], which has always been the bread and butter of how we've gone to market. And I think that that's something that neither Palo or Zscaler are able to match.
If things go your way — and you're able to fulfill this vision you have for your security business — how big of a player in cybersecurity do you think Cloudflare could be in the future?
If you fast-forward 10 years from now, I'm not sure that there are stand-alone security players. And so I actually think that the Zscalers and Palo Altos are more likely to get absorbed into [the platforms of] the larger cloud providers. Or they’ll replicate that functionality themselves. That's not going to happen in the short-term.
"[I]f you have enough data, and you're running it all through systems that you control, you can solve a lot of these problems very effectively."
The last company I started was in the anti-spam space. And I remember pretty clearly when Bill Gates said [in the future] "there will be no anti-spam companies.” Everyone in the space laughed at him. But he was just dead-right. What he saw, that others didn't see, was that if you have enough data, and you're running it all through systems that you control, you can solve a lot of these problems very effectively. For traditional spam, Gmail and Microsoft and others have largely solved the problem. If you try today to run your own mail server, it's really difficult. But because everything is consolidated behind a relatively small set of email providers, they have largely tackled the spam problem.
I think in 10 years, you will see more and more of what is traditionally thought of as the cybersecurity space get absorbed by cloud providers. So when we think about who we are competing with, [yes] we always compete with Zscaler and Palo Alto. But really, who we think we're competing with over the long-term is AWS. I think the companies that are able to take cybersecurity and do it well — and build out a true cloud platform themselves — will dwarf anything that we're seeing in the cybersecurity space today.
The traditional knock on cybersecurity companies is that they have a very short shelf life. I think the way that you avoid that is by truly solving the problem — and then recognizing that over time, as that problem gets solved, cybersecurity just becomes table stakes.
Why just name AWS as a major competitor? Not Microsoft, too?
I think we will compete with those companies, but we'll also cooperate with them as well. Microsoft has been a terrific partner to us and uses our network for a number of things. For instance, their VPN product, which is built into Microsoft Edge, is powered by Cloudflare's network. I actually think with Microsoft, we are much more cooperative. I think Amazon is the company that I would say we're much more competitive with.
