According to a Markets and Markets report, the global Cloud Security Market is expected to grow from $4.09 billion in 2017 to $12.73 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of more than 25%. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Cloudflare is a leading provider of cloud-based security solutions.
Cloudflare’s Offerings
San Francisco-based CloudFflare was founded by Harvard students Michelle Zatlyn and Matthew Prince with their friend Lee Holloway in 2009. The idea behind Cloudflare came to Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway when they set out to figure out where email spam came from. To search for the answer, the duo worked on Project Honey Pot, a system that allowed anyone with a website to track how spammers harvested email addresses.
By 2009, Matthew had enrolled for his MBA from the Harvard Business School where he met Michelle who helped recognize the opportunity to build a service that would not only track Internet threats, but also help in stopping them. While Matthew and Michelle worked out the business plan, Lee began to build a first prototype. Soon, Cloudflare was born.
Cloudflare helps users access a more secure internet, while ensuring that users did not suffer from latency. By building a layer of caching for static resources, Cloudflare was taking spam away from its users’ sites to not only deliver security, but also improve performance.
Cloudflare’s Enterprise Focus
Since being founded, Cloudflare has been expanding its target market. While traditionally focused on protecting and providing acceleration for web applications for small businesses, the company is now targeting enterprises. As part of the focus, it launched Spectrum, a solution targeted at mainframe applications, IoT, and legacy email. It protects and provides performance acceleration for traffic that runs on the Transmission Control Protocol or User Datagram Protocol, thus allowing organizations to bring in cloud-based security and protection.
