How Cloudflare keeps employees productive from any location

Cloudflare, a company with over 1,200 employees in 13 offices and a network operating in 200 cities, has developed an alternative to traditional corporate VPNs. The company built Cloudflare Access as part of its Cloudflare for Teams security platform to replace its previous VPN system, which was difficult to manage and scale. Cloudflare Access runs on the company's serverless platform, Workers, allowing it to operate at a large scale without being constrained by a single physical appliance. The platform has been expanded over the last two years to address various use cases and remove reliance on VPNs. The Cloudflare for Teams security platform focuses on keeping users, devices, and data safe while maintaining performance and user experience. It replaces corporate VPNs with Cloudflare's network, allowing teams to deploy internal tools in any environment and secure them consistently using Cloudflare's network. Administrators can build rules to decide who should be able to access the protected tools, and users are prompted to authenticate with their team's identity provider when they need to connect. Argo Tunnel is used to connect resources through a secure outbound connection without exposing new holes in corporate firewalls. This tunnel makes outbound-only calls to the Cloudflare network, and organizations can disable all inbound connections by replacing complex firewall rules with just one rule. Cloudflare Access has been implemented for various use cases within the company, such as securing internal web applications like Jira or iManage, enabling SSH connections through Cloudflare Access, and providing a single location for users to launch any application they should be able to reach. The platform also offers per-request logging, allowing administrators to capture every request made to internal resources without any code changes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cloudflare has extended its offer of free access to its Teams product for businesses of all sizes until September 1, 2020. The company aims to help organizations maintain productivity and security while employees work remotely.