Resilience, data residency and the agent era — for a national bank
Fifteen years of turning security infrastructure from a capital project into a utility
| 2010 · Public launch at TechCrunch Disrupt Ships with a free tier containing what competitors sold as enterprise hardware. The distribution model, not a marketing tactic. |
| 2011–13 · CDN, WAF and DDoS on the free plan Attack mitigation becomes a default setting rather than an appliance purchase order. Removes the budget cycle from the security decision. |
| 2014 · Universal SSL Free TLS certificates for every customer, including the free tier — roughly doubling the number of encrypted sites on the Internet overnight. |
| 2017 · Workers Serverless on V8 isolates. No cold starts, because the runtime is already warm in every data centre. |
| Apr 2018 · 1.1.1.1 The fastest public DNS resolver, built privacy-first — querying IP addresses are never written to disk, at a time when that data was the obvious way to monetise it. |
| 13 Sept 2019 · IPO, NYSE: NET The balance sheet becomes public. For a regulated buyer, that is what makes a vendor auditable rather than merely trusted. |
| 2020 · Cloudflare One Zero Trust and SASE on one control plane. The end of the VPN concentrator as a single point of failure. |
| 2021 · R2 S3-compatible object storage with no egress fees — removing the industry's toll on moving your own data. |
| 2023 · Workers AI and Vectorize Inference and vector search running in the same data centres the traffic already passes through. RAG without a round trip to a central region. |
| 2025 · Agents SDK and AI Gateway Stateful agents on Durable Objects, and one control point for model cost, caching and observability. |
| Dec 2025 · Replicate acquired 50,000+ production-ready models brought inside the platform, so model choice stops being its own infrastructure project. |
| Apr 2026 · Agent Cloud with OpenAI Managed infrastructure for enterprise agents, and Project Think — durable execution, sub-agents and sandboxed code for long-running tasks. |
| Jul 2026 · Pay-per-answer Publishers are paid when AI uses their content, not merely when a bot fetches it. Cloudflare becomes the toll layer between content and models. |
Every service runs in every data centre — no backhauling, no second-tier regions, single-pass inspection
| Financial services and payments | Visa · SoFi · Stripe · Block |
| Regulated and global enterprise | Roche · Labcorp · Telefónica · Carrefour · Workday · Broadcom · L'Oréal · Mars · Atlassian |
| The AI frontier | Anthropic · OpenAI · CoreWeave · Character.AI · Leonardo.ai |
| Consumer scale | Shopify · Canva · Discord · DoorDash · Uber · Garmin · Indeed |
Four problems. Each one is two different problems depending on which chair you sit in — and each has one answer.
| The problem | What the CISO thinks | What the CFO thinks | One answer, for both | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fragmented security | "I have four consoles and four alerting models. I cannot see the whole attack surface, and every audit becomes a reconciliation exercise." | "Four contracts, four renewals, four integration projects — and appliance refresh cycles that arrive whether or not the threat changed." | → | One control plane. Network, security and applications in one console, one contract, and traffic inspected in a single pass rather than bounced between layers. |
| A network built for branches, not for the Internet | "Everything is backhauled to two data centres for inspection, and my remote staff and third parties sit behind a concentrator that is itself the single point of failure." | "I am paying for MPLS circuits and per-seat VPN licences on a workforce that no longer sits in branches." | → | Global scale, locally. 348 cities, 57 in Europe. Under 50ms from 95% of connected users, with inspection at the nearest data centre — so there is nothing to backhaul and no concentrator to size. |
| Operational load | "My specialists spend the week on tunnels, certificates and rule tuning instead of on threat work." | "Headcount is funding maintenance rather than capability. Every new control needs another FTE." | → | Zero Trust without a concentrator. Access granted by identity — no hardware to maintain, no client to roll out, no certificate rotation to schedule. |
| No credible answer for the regulator | "DORA wants evidence of resilience testing, incident timelines and third-party oversight. Assembling it from four vendors takes weeks per cycle." | "Audit and remediation cost rises every cycle, and the concentration-risk register still cannot be closed." | → | Evidence by default. ISO 27001 / 27701 / 27018, PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type II, C5 Type 2, a 100% availability SLA, and the DORA Article 30 mapping published clause by clause. |
Two ways AI shows up: running the network you sit behind, and running the one you build. Each with a pain it removes.
| Capability | The pain today | The value added |
|---|---|---|
| Bot Pattern ML | Credential stuffing and account takeover arrive at volume; CAPTCHAs that stop them also cost conversion | Every request scored against models trained on traffic from 1 in 5 websites on the Internet — a dataset that cannot be bought |
| Speed Brain | Performance tuning is a manual project that is never finished | The model predicts the next navigation and prefetches it. Performance as a decision, not a configuration task |
| WAF Copilot | A new attack pattern waits for a human tuning cycle before anything blocks it | Rules proposed and generated autonomously as patterns appear, with a human approving rather than authoring |
| AI Crawl Control | No visibility of which AI systems read your content, and no mechanism to control it | See every AI crawler, then block it, price it, or be paid per answer it uses |
| Edge PII handling | GenAI programmes stall at one question: where does customer data actually go? | Personal data detected and masked at the edge before it reaches a model, a log, or a third party |
| Capability | The pain today | The value added |
|---|---|---|
| Workers AI | GPU procurement cycles, capacity planning, and cold starts on every idle path | Serverless inference across 348 cities, running where the user already is. No GPUs to buy, no cold starts |
| Replicate | Choosing and hosting models becomes its own infrastructure project | 50,000+ production-ready models inside the platform, swappable without re-architecting |
| Vectorize | RAG round-trips to a central region add latency to every answer | Vector store local to the data centre handling the request — retrieval without the round trip |
| AI Gateway | Model spend is neither budgetable nor observable until the invoice arrives | One control point for caching, rate limiting, cost and observability across any model or provider |
| Agents SDK · Project Think | Agents lose state, cannot run long tasks, and have no audit trail for what they did | Durable execution with state in Durable Objects, sub-agents, sandboxes — and a record of every action taken |
So that whatever we conclude, you end up with a document your own teams can use
| Who would need to be there | Time | What we would check together |
|---|---|---|
| Head of Network or Infrastructure with our Solutions Engineer | 90 min one session | The current traffic path, and where inspection happens today |
| Security architecture lead | same session | Third-party and contractor access, and what still reaches origin |
| Whoever owns the vendor contracts procurement or FP&A | 30 min separate | Renewal dates, and where the spend sits across the four vendors |
| Yourselves CISO and CFO | 30 min two weeks later | The written findings — and whether they justify a next step at all |
What happens when something breaks outside your perimeter, inside it, or at Cloudflare
| Volumetric DDoS on payment rails Mitigated at the data centre nearest the attacker, across all 348 cities. No scrubbing centre, nothing hauled to a central site. Capacity is the whole network, not an appliance. |
| ISP, BGP or subsea degradation Anycast plus 13,000+ interconnections. Traffic reroutes around the fault; Argo Smart Routing actively avoids congested and brown-out paths. |
| A cloud region or third-party API fails Load balancing with health checks fails over across clouds and on-prem. Cloud-agnostic by design. |
| Traffic surge — payday, market event Waiting Room queues in a controlled way instead of letting the service collapse. |
| Origin or data centre unreachable Always Online and Cache Reserve serve a usable version while the origin is down. |
| VPN concentrator saturated or down Zero Trust access by identity — no concentrator exists to fail, and no client rollout to coordinate. |
| Origin exposed in order to be reachable Cloudflare Tunnel — outbound-only connection, no inbound ports open. |
| Appliance refresh and maintenance windows The control plane is the network. There is no hardware to fail over between. |
| No single point of failure Every service in every one of 348 cities. A failed location is absorbed by its neighbours — the failure domain is a city, not the service. |
| 100% availability SLA on Enterprise, with remedies and a credit process, incorporated into the Terms of Service. |
| TLPT participation — committed under DORA Articles 26–27. |
| Unrestricted audit rights for you, your appointed third party, and the competent authority. |
| Supply-chain transparency — published sub-processor list, 30 days' notice, right to object. Cloudflare is liable for its sub-processors. |
| Exit strategy, Art. 30(3)(f) — services continue for a pre-defined transition period after termination, on request. |
Cloudflare Data Localization Suite — and why privacy here is a business model rather than a feature
| Regional Services You choose the region where TLS is decrypted and where WAF, CDN and Workers execute. Inspection stays in the EU. |
| Geo Key Manager / Keyless SSL Private TLS keys stored only in the geography you specify — or kept in your own infrastructure, never shared with us. |
| Customer Metadata Boundary Logs and metadata do not leave your specified region. |
| Durable Objects jurisdiction restrictions Serverless state pinned to a region, so what you build is regionally confined by construction. |
| DDoS mitigated at the nearest data centre Attack traffic is dropped locally. Nothing is shipped out of region to be scrubbed. |
| Your data stays yours You retain all IP rights. Logpush exports to storage you control, during and after the contract. |
| Zaraz Moves third-party tags off the browser and onto the edge, gated by consent. Analytics and marketing tags stop firing before the customer agrees, and stop leaking data to vendors directly from the browser. |
| Page Shield Shows every script actually running on your banking portal and alerts on change — the client-side visibility that e-Privacy and the PCI DSS 4.0 client-side script requirements both depend on. |
| Edge PII handling Detects and masks personal data at the edge before it reaches a log, a model or a third party. |