Cloudflare, Inc., an American web-infrastructure and website-security company that provids content-delivery-network services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security, and distributed domain-name-server services, has decided to make most of its employees work from home due to Coronavirus Emergency.
The Coronavirus is a disease that comes with Runny nose, Sore throat, Cough, Fever, Pneumonia and Difficulty breathing (severe cases), as symptoms, which can easily and much faster be contracted in an ‘active’ envirnment.
According to Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO Cloudflare, the health and safety of employees and customers are their top priority.
Prince also mentioned their new product, the Cloudflare for Teams, which helps support secure and efficient remote work. It is out for free for all small businesses the next six months.
“We’re doing this to help ensure that small businesses that implement work from home policies in order to combat the spread of the virus can ensure business continuity.”
Read complete statement below:
We know that organizations and individuals around the world depend on Cloudflare and our network. I wanted to send you a personal note to let you know how Cloudflare is dealing with the Coronavirus emergency.
First, the health and safety of our employees and customers is our top priority. We have implemented a number of sensible policies to this end, including encouraging many employees to work from home. This, however, hasn’t slowed our operations. Our network operations center (NOC), security operations center (SOC), and customer support teams will remain fully operational and can do their jobs entirely remote as needed.
Second, we are tracking Internet usage patterns globally. As more people work from home, peak traffic in impacted regions has increased, on average, approximately 10%. In Italy, which has imposed a nationwide quarantine, peak Internet traffic is up 30%. Traffic patterns have also shifted so peak traffic is occurring earlier in the day in impacted regions. None of these traffic changes raise any concern for us. Cloudflare’s network is well provisioned to handle significant spikes in traffic. We have not seen, and do not anticipate, any impact to our network’s performance, reliability, or security globally.
Third, we are monitoring for any changes in cyberthreats. While we have seen more phishing attacks using the Coronavirus as a lure, we have not seen any significant increase in attack traffic or new threats. Again, our SOC remains fully operational and is continuously monitoring for any new security threats that may emerge.
Finally, we recognize that this emergency has put strain on the infrastructure of companies around the world as more employees work from home. On Monday, I wrote about how we are making our Cloudflare for Teams product, which helps support secure and efficient remote work, free for small businesses for at least the next six months:
As the severity of the emergency has become clearer over the course of this week, we decided to extend this offer to help any business, regardless of size. The healthy functioning of our economy globally depends on work continuing to get done, even as people need to do that work remotely. If Cloudflare can do anything to help ensure that happens, I believe it is our duty to do so.
If you are already a Cloudflare for Teams customer, we have removed the caps on usage during this emergency so you can scale to whatever number of seats you need without additional cost. If you are not yet using Cloudflare for Teams, and if you or your employer are struggling with limits on the capacity of your existing VPN or Firewall, we stand ready to help and have removed the limits on the free trials of our Access and Gateway products for at least the next six months. Cloudflare employees around the world have volunteered to run no-cost onboarding sessions so you can get set up quickly and ensure your business’ continuity.
Thank you for being a Cloudflare customer. These are challenging times but I want you to know that we stand ready to help however we can. We understand the critical role we play in the functioning of the Internet and we are continually humbled by the trust you place in us. Together, we can get through this.
