Why I'm helping Cloudflare grow in Canada

I am incredibly excited to join Cloudflare as Head of Sales for Canada to expand the company’s growth in the region as part of its mission to help build a better Internet. This is an important milestone for Cloudflare to better serve the needs of our Canadian customers, recruit local talent, and build on the regional successes we’ve had around the globe.

Internet security, privacy, and performance are key drivers for every business, individual, and public sector organization. Universal dependency on the Internet has significantly increased, with web commerce, remote learning, distributed teams, remote work, virtual meetings etc. — and this is all here to stay.

Over the last few years we have seen the industry move from on-premise infrastructure and applications to a cloud-first approach with cloud and SaaS architectures. As this significant and inevitable transition has accelerated, it has introduced new complexities, challenges, and opportunities for organizations with the evolution to heterogeneous environments across public cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments.

At the same time, a company’s digital assets (data, web properties, applications, etc.) have become their most valuable assets. How an organization uses the Internet to serve their customers, partners, and employees has become a strategic priority for organizations around the world. With the rapid shift to remote work caused by the pandemic, businesses of all sizes are looking to adopt a Zero Trust architecture. According to an October 2020 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, 76% of businesses today say their organization’s security approach is “antiquated” and that they need to shift to a Zero Trust framework. The Cloudflare team in Canada is dedicated to helping Canadian organizations successfully scale and optimize their businesses in this landscape.

At the same time, the threat landscape has evolved faster than ever before. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, Cloudflare blocked an average of 3.2 billion attacks per day originating in Canada—a 26.53% increase from the previous quarter. There is a need to secure websites, corporate and personal data, users, applications, and entire networks in a different way. In a way that provides cloud-based security and network services—to scale with organizations and their business needs.

The volume and sophistication of network attacks can strain the defensive capabilities of even the most advanced enterprises, especially as many organizations have traditional security and network architectures with individual equipment for specific functions in corporate data centers. Leveraging cloud-based security and networking functionalities provides an architectural shift with better security, performance, and reliability. This is how Cloudflare’s global network, one of the largest in the world, protects enterprise networks, applications, and users in a way that reduces complexity, and enables organizational agility.

My background includes years of working with enterprise and public sector customers to address their business needs and technology challenges with innovative software and services. My career has included leadership positions with Cisco, Splunk, CenturyLink, and Microsoft with responsibilities across sales leadership, solutions engineering, business development, and alliances. I’ve had the pleasure of leading teams to serve enterprise customers in Canada, the Americas, and across the globe, with technologies in security, networking, cloud, and XaaS. Providing solutions to customers, to enable them to address their unique needs, and ultimately transform their organizations, is something I’m excited to help achieve with Cloudflare.

I joined Cloudflare because I believe in its mission to help build a better Internet and have seen how the company delivers truly disruptive and innovative solutions for customers—of all sizes in various industries. The team at Cloudflare has this mission rooted in everything they do, to benefit customers, developers, and Internet users all across the globe. Some of the reasons I’m most excited to embark on this journey with Cloudflare:

Cloudflare is at the forefront of industry trends, enabling customers to use cloud-based security and networking solutions, and providing solutions for data privacy and data residency. These are solutions that are easy to use and easy to deploy across the world. This edge computing network architecture provides security and performance to all users at incredible scale.

At Cloudflare, the pace of innovation is amazing. Leveraging its unique global network, the company is continuously innovating to release new products and features in the cloud that are immediately available at scale—to its customers and all users worldwide. Some of the latest products disrupting traditional IT approaches include:

• Magic Transit uses Cloudflare's global infrastructure to protect organizations’ entire networks, not just their web-facing applications, to protect office networks and keep companies running

• Cloudflare One, a platform to connect and secure companies and teams anywhere (remote and across offices) and on any device regardless of location

• Cloudflare Workers, the serverless solution redefining how applications are deployed at the network edge—instantly across the globe with exceptional performance and reliability

• Argo Smart Routing, which acts as Waze for the Internet, can significantly cut the amount of time users online spend waiting for content

• Remote Browser Isolation provides security at the “last mile” of Internet connectivity: web browsers, which are one of your biggest attack surfaces

• Regional Services give customers the ability to control data flows and manage where their traffic is handled, maintaining regional control over their data to comply with data residency requirements or their customer preferences

• Cloudflare’s intent to “do the right thing” is reflected in several initiatives that give back to society, such as through Project Fair Shot and the Athenian Project. Project Fair Shot is a no-charge program offering a digital Waiting Room service to any organization involved with the COVID-19 vaccine scheduling and distribution. We’ve had Project Fair Shot initiatives underway around the world, including several in Canada and we’re here to help any government, pharmacy, or organisation that’s distributing the vaccine do so efficiently and withstand demands. And Cloudflare’s Athenian Project provides its enterprise-class service for free to any state or local government elections' officials, in order to protect services like voter registration, poll location, precinct reporting, and official results.

• Our co-founder, President & COO, Michelle Zatlyn, is originally from Canada and is committed to Cloudflare’s further investment in the region, working with Canadian businesses and organizations, and to the growing technology landscape in Canada. Here she shares more about this and Cloudflare Canada.

• Overall, Cloudflare’s entire culture has a clear focus that revolves around its customers, product excellence, innovation, and collaboration. We have an extremely talented and passionate team, and I am thrilled to be part of it to help Cloudflare grow even more in Canada.

There are several thousand Cloudflare customers in Canada already, including large enterprises, small companies, individuals, and public sector organizations. We are eager to bring even more Internet security, reliability, and more speed to users in the region. We recently established a local team in Toronto and our team will continue to grow in Canada. The initial functions prioritized for our office are Engineering, Research and Development, Customer Success, Sales, and Partnerships, and more, to work with our current and future customers of all sizes and industries across Canada, and to support the overall Canadian Internet landscape.

I am especially excited about the opportunity for Cloudflare to grow in the region to help Canadian customers with essential and unique security and networking. If you are a business in Canada that would like to chat about your cybersecurity or Internet performance, or explore how Cloudflare can assist, please get in touch with us or send me a message directly at ash@cloudflare.com. If you are interested in exploring careers at Cloudflare, our team in Canada is growing(!), and you can check out our careers page to learn more.

I have been impressed by what Cloudflare has built globally in a short period of time, and I am even more excited by what lies ahead for our Canadian customers, partners, and team.