Cloudflare Stock

Cloudflare, Inc. (Cloudflare) operates as a global cloud services provider.

The company delivers a broad range of services to businesses of all sizes and in all geographies — making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual network hardware. The company’s network serves as a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The company serves comprehensive customer needs across security and connectivity, and increasingly, the distributed and programmable nature of the company’s network is resulting in customers building their applications on top of the company’s network, too — including both traditional applications and those that are enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI).

Network

The company has built an efficient, scalable, programmable network that allows the company to rapidly develop and deploy its products for the company’s customers and that is architected to be flexible, scalable, and get more and more efficient as it expands. The company’s network is designed to be able to grow capacity quickly and inexpensively; to allow for every server, in every city, to run nearly every Cloudflare service; and to allow the company to shift customers and traffic across its network efficiently. The company refers to this architecture as ‘serverless’ because it means the company can deploy standard, commodity hardware, and the company’s product developers and customers do not need to worry about the underlying servers. The company’s software is designed to manage the deployment and execution of its product developers’ code and the company’s customers’ code across its network. Because the company manages the execution and prioritization of code running across the company’s network, it means that the company is both able to improve the performance of its highest paying customers, and also effectively leverage idle capacity across the company’s network.

The company’s network spans more than 310 cities in over 120 countries worldwide and interconnects with over 13,000 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud services, and enterprises.

Growth Strategy

The key elements of the company’s growth strategy are to acquire new customers; expand the company’s relationships with existing customers; develop new products and solutions; and extend the company’s developer solutions strategy.

Products

The company delivers a suite of deeply integrated products that serve as a unified control plane for the company’s customers, allowing them to build, connect, and secure web applications and corporate infrastructure. Customers can quickly and easily join Cloudflare by using just one of the company’s products and then expand their usage of Cloudflare over time by adding additional products.

The company’s full suite of products consists of its website and application services to deliver security, performance, and reliability for an organization's websites, applications, and application programming interfaces (APIs); the company’s secure access service edge (SASE) platform — Cloudflare One — which contains the company’s suite of Zero Trust and network services solutions to help ensure traffic in and out of an organization’s internal network and devices is verified and authorized, as well as to securely connect data centers, cloud services, and branch offices to an organization with the company’s Connectivity Cloud; its developer-based solutions to build and deploy serverless applications with scale, performance, security and reliability; and the company’s consumer offerings.

Website and Application Services

Cloudflare offers a suite of website and application services products to help ensure that Internet properties, such as websites, applications, and APIs that are exposed to the Internet are safe from attack, and are fast and reliable. This suite of products also includes analytics products to provide a customer with the ability to build customized analytics to provide insights and intelligence to further protect and accelerate their Internet properties, such as monitoring threats, searching for specific search engine crawlers, understanding DNS query traffic, and analyzing real time data traffic.

Website and Application Security

The company provides an integrated cloud-based security solution designed to secure any combination of platforms, including public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, SaaS applications, and ‘Internet of things’ devices. The company’s primary website and application security product offerings include:

Web Application Firewall (WAF): Protects a customer’s Internet properties from common vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and cross-site forgery requests, with no changes to the customer’s existing infrastructure.

Bot Management: Detects and manages undesired or malicious Internet traffic generated by malicious software programs called bots, while still allowing useful bots to access Internet properties through machine learning and behavioral analytics.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection: Protects a customer’s website applications from DDoS attacks, which are malicious attempts to disrupt the normal operations of an application, targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

API Gateway: Keeps customer APIs secure and productive with API discovery, integrated API management and analytics, and layered API defenses.

SSL / TLS Encryption: Manages encrypted secure socket layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) web traffic to prevent data theft and tampering to improve security, as well as application and website productivity. Advanced Certificate Manager (ACM) also provides a consolidated certificate management experience with greater configuration for managing multiple certificates.

Rate Limiting: Provides the ability to configure thresholds, define responses, and gain valuable insights into specific URLs of websites, applications, or API endpoints.

Script Management (Page Shield): Protects website visitors from customer-side attacks that target vulnerabilities directly in the browser environment.

Security Center: An actionable dashboard that provides insights into threats, risks, and configuration suggestions, acting as a security practitioner’s home page.

Website and Application Performance

The company’s website and application performance solutions improve conversions, reduce churn, and improve visitor experiences by accelerating web and mobile performance, while keeping applications available and allowing the company’s customers to run their digital operations much more efficiently. The company’s primary website and application performance product offerings include:

Content Delivery: Accelerates content delivery time by automatically serving the company’s customers' most popular content from its network locations close to the company’s customers’ users.

Load Balancing: Enhances performance and reliability for single, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud environments. The company’s cloud-based products provide local and global load balancing to reduce latency by distributing traffic across multiple servers or by routing traffic to the closest geolocation region to the user.

DNS: Authoritative DNS keeps customer Internet properties online and available around the world, and DNS resolver returns the IP addresses of servers when a user enters a domain name.

Argo Smart Routing: Improves Internet performance by intelligently routing end users through less congested and more reliable paths over the Internet using the company’s network.

Video Stream Delivery: Caches and delivers HTTP(S) video content on websites, saving the customer on origin server bandwidth costs.

Web Optimization: Adjusts automatically the way content is delivered based on the particular device accessing the site to improve speed without affecting the customer’s Internet property look or features.

Cache Reserve: Serves a limited copy of a cached website, to keep it online for a customer’s visitors should the customer’s origin server go down.

Cloudflare Waiting Room: Allows organizations to route large volumes of users to a custom-branded virtual waiting room, helping preserve customer experience and protect origin servers from being overwhelmed with requests.

Cloudflare Data Localization Suite: Sets rules and controls at the network edge about where data is stored and protected, while taking advantage of Cloudflare's global network.

SASE Platform (Cloudflare One)

The company’s SASE platform combines network services and Zero Trust security through the Cloudflare One suite of products to provide a comprehensive, cloud-based network-as-a-service solution that is designed to be secure, fast, reliable, and define the future of the corporate network. By leveraging the public Internet, Cloudflare One brings together in a single pane of glass how employees connect, on-ramps for branch offices, secure connectivity for applications, and controlled access to SaaS applications.

Network Services

These products help the company’s customers connect, secure, and accelerate their corporate networks, without the need to manage legacy network hardware. This effectively enables Cloudflare to act as a secure wide area network (WAN) for all entities on a corporate network regardless of what device they use or where they are located.

Magic WAN: Connects and routes traffic between different networks within an enterprise, which are often broadly geographically dispersed, across Cloudflare's global network.

Magic Transit: Extends the benefits of the company’s network to customers' on-premises and data center networks. Magic Transit is deployed in front of an enterprise network and protects it at the IP layer from DDoS attacks and enables provisioning of a full suite of virtual network functions, including IP packet filtering and firewalling, load balancing, and traffic management tools.

Magic Firewall: Cloud-based firewall enables administrators to set policies for all traffic entering and leaving the network.

Cloudflare Network Interconnect: Direct Internet connectivity between Cloudflare’s global network and on-premises networks wherever they are, whether over a private network interconnect or over an Internet exchange.

Spectrum: Extends Cloudflare’s speed, security, and reliability functionality to TCP/UDP applications at the transport layer of the Internet, such as gaming applications and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) applications.

Zero Trust Security

These products shield users of a corporate network from attacks, inspect traffic for threats, and apply privilege rules to grant access to the customer's data and applications.

Cloudflare Access: Enforces Zero Trust application access based on identity.

Cloudflare Gateway: Filters all traffic crossing to customer employee devices to prevent malicious traffic reaching end-user devices.

Remote Browser Isolation: Runs a customer's browsers in the cloud as opposed to on-device, insulating devices from attacks.

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB): Provides visibility and control over SaaS applications to help prevent data leaks and compliance violations.

Cloud Email Security: Protects users of a corporate network from phishing, business email compromise, and email supply chain attacks.

Data Loss Prevention: Inspects HTTP/S traffic for sensitive data like personally identifiable information (PII) and prevents exfiltration of customer information with allow or block policies.

Developer-based Solutions

By leveraging the company’s serverless platform, developers can build serverless applications on the company’s network that scale without needing to spend time and effort on infrastructure or operations. This enables developers to deliver more performant applications that have global scale, all while improving their productivity. The company’s primary developer-based solutions include:

Cloudflare Workers: Allows developers to augment existing applications or create entirely new ones through a lightweight execution environment without configuring or maintaining infrastructure.

R2 Object Storage: Provides global object storage and the ability to create multi-cloud architectures for data storage.

Workers KV: Helps developers manage states for their applications with a globally distributed key-value storage.

Durable Objects: Enables a customer to build and run collaborative applications, such as chat rooms, games, and whiteboards, on the company’s global network.

Cloudflare Pages: Allows front-end developers to quickly and easily build, collaborate on, and deploy websites.

Cloudflare Stream: Enables live and on-demand video streaming from the company’s global network.

Cloudflare Images: Provides an end-to-end solution to cost-effectively build and maintain image infrastructure.

Consumer Offerings

The company’s consumer products make it easy for individuals to have a performant and secure Internet experience. Adoption of the company’s consumer offerings makes its business offerings more powerful and adoption of the company’s business offerings improves its consumer offerings. The company’s consumer offerings also have been an effective and differentiated marketing channel to increase the awareness of the company’s brand. The company’s primary consumer product offerings include:

1.1.1.1: A consumer DNS resolver app that provides a fast and private way to browse the Internet. 1.1.1.1 is a public DNS resolver, but unlike most DNS resolvers, the company does not sell user data to advertisers. The company’s implementation of 1.1.1.1 makes it among the fastest resolvers available, and the company supports DNS over HTTPS (DoH) which encrypts and secures consumers’ DNS requests. An additional version of the company’s consumer DNS resolver known as 1.1.1.1 for Families adds a layer of protection to consumer home networks and protects them from malware and adult content.

WARP: A virtual private network (VPN) for consumers designed to secure and accelerate traffic on mobile devices. The basic version of WARP is included as an option with the 1.1.1.1 App for free, and a premium version that accelerates a user's Internet access is available for purchase.

Cloudflare Registrar: Offers secure registration and management of domain names.

Customers

The company views its millions of free and paying customers, which manage millions of Internet properties on the company’s network, as part of a broad, global community.

As of December 31, 2023, the company had approximately 190,000 paying customers across more than 120 countries. The company’s paying customer base is highly diversified across organizations of all sizes in every major industry vertical, including technology, healthcare, financial services, consumer and retail, industrial, non-profit, and government. The company’s large customer count was 2,756 as of December 31, 2023.

Sales

The company has a multi-pronged go to market approach that allows the company to efficiently serve the needs of very small to very large customers. By using a combination of web self-service, direct sales, and indirect sales, the company is able to serve customers across a wide range of sizes, geographies, and vertical markets.

The company offers self-service access to certain of its products through the company’s website and hosting partners where customers can either start on a free or paid plan and, as the company demonstrates value, upgrade over time. Those customers on paid Pro and/or Business plans, which the company refers to as ‘pay-as-you-go’ customers, are able to sign up for plans of bundled products, as well as individual offerings that are payable monthly or annually. Pay-as-you-go customers are able to onboard and customize the company’s products through its console and pay for their subscription using a credit card. The company’s automated and easy to use process enables the company to efficiently onboard new customers or existing customers to new products without requiring any interaction with its sales team. As pay-as-you-go customers evolve their usage of the company’s products, some upgrade to an Enterprise plan for greater control, higher service levels and terms, or productivity-related tools while existing contracted customers can add their increased usage or expanded products to their bills. The company refers to customers on an Enterprise plan as ‘contracted’ customers.

The company sells directly to contracted customers through its global, technically-oriented inside and field sales teams, and indirectly through the company’s ecosystem of channel partners that includes managed service providers, resellers, distributors, and global system integrators. For large contracted customers, the company’s relationships often start with a portion of the customer’s overall network, security and application needs and expand over time as they consolidate other vendors’ services and increase their adoption of the company’s products and services.

Marketing

The company’s marketing intends to clearly communicate the value of its offerings to a large and diverse set of global customers at scale. The company drives organic awareness and adoption of its products by providing a free offering that enables millions of users to experience the benefits of the company’s global network before they adopt its pay-as-you-go offerings or contract for the company’s Enterprise plan. The company engages with developers across blogs, social media, and other channels to help build the company’s brand and visibility among technical communities. In addition, the company’s consumer products, including 1.1.1.1 and WARP, provide an effective and differentiated marketing channel to expand the awareness of the company’s brand.

The company invests in a variety of targeted digital and non-digital marketing activities and programs to build awareness, engage with prospects, and build pipeline for the company’s global sales teams. The company also shares stories of how large customers are rapidly adopting its services across use cases, industry verticals, and geographies, to communicate customer trust and the company’s market momentum.

Intellectual Property

As of December 31, 2023, the company had 290 issued patents and 67 pending patent applications in the United States and abroad. The company’s issued patents are scheduled to expire between 2030 and 2043, and cover various aspects of the company’s network and products. In addition, the company has registered ‘Cloudflare’ as a trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions; and the company has filed other trademark applications in the United States. The company is also the registered holder of a variety of domestic and international domain names that include ‘Cloudflare’ (including ‘Cloudflare.com’).

History

Cloudflare, Inc. was founded in 2009. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2009.