Cloudflare launches cloud-native firewall in zero trust push

The web infrastructure company and CDN provider Cloudflare has announced that it is expanding its Zero Trust firewall capabilities to help organizations secure their entire corporate networks.

While traditional firewalls consist of hardware boxes installed on company premises, they weren’t designed for employees working from home or for cloud applications. In order to meet this challenge, some organizations have turned to “virtualized” firewalls though they face many of the same challenges as hardware appliances do such as capacity planning and managing primary/backup devices.

For this reason, Cloudflare has announced that it will expand the functionality of its cloud firewall so that CIOs can better secure their entire corporate network, apply Zero Trust policies to all traffic and gain deeper network visibility. 

At the same time, since the company’s firewall runs everywhere, CIOs will no longer need to rely on centralizing traffic on one box in one location whether it be physical or virtual.

Oahu Program

In addition to expanding its Zero Trust firewall capabilities, Cloudflare has also announced the launch of its new Oahu Program.

The new program helps organizations with their Zero Trust migration by providing new capabilities and resources to simply and easily import policies from legacy firewall boxes to Cloudflare’s cloud-native service. However, eligible organizations can qualify for discounts on the company’s Zero Trust firewall solution to help mitigate the cost of switching.

Cloudflare is also sweetening the deal by entering companies that deprecate hardware firewalls in a contest to win a trip to Oahu, Hawaii.

Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince explained in a press release how its new Oahu Program will make it easier for organizations to leave legacy tech behind, saying:

“CIOs know that the corporate network is changing fast, and we want to help make that transition easy, flexible, and scalable. When working from everywhere became possible, workers migrated from legacy locations like Palo Alto to work wherever they wanted. With our Oahu Program, we are making it easy for companies to leave legacy tech behind in favor of an everywhere firewall delivered from the cloud.”

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