Cloudflare Puts Its Network in the Office Basement
Cloudflare’s network already spans more than 250 cities, often with multiple data centers per city to get as close to users as possible. The company has now set its sights on a much more local target: the office building itself. With Cloudflare for Offices, Cloudflare is forming strategic partnerships to place its hardware inside busy office buildings and multi-dwelling units around the world. The goal is to put the people who work in those buildings just microseconds from Cloudflare's global network.
The company has designed custom secure hardware and lined up fiber providers to scale the model beyond a handful of pilot locations. For building owners and operators, the presence of Cloudflare's infrastructure is pitched as an amenity that can increase property value and occupancy. For tenants, it means consistent security and performance whether employees work in a headquarters, a satellite office, or a shared workspace.
Offices Are the Next Connectivity Frontier
The past 18 months have permanently altered where work happens. What remains unclear is the exact mix of office, home, and remote work going forward. What is clear is that flexibility, security, and performance can no longer be traded off against each other. Cloudflare for Offices is an attempt to deliver all three to commercial real estate by connecting to enterprises directly.
The traditional office network stack — MPLS links, WANs, hardware firewalls, and VPNs — was built for a world where most computing happened inside a building. The pandemic showed how poorly that model fares when the office is empty and everyone is tunneling in from outside. Cloudflare argues that maintaining dedicated boxes for office connectivity will soon look as anachronistic as maintaining an on-premises server room for compute and storage.
The company knows the pain firsthand. Setting up new offices and securing shared workspaces internally has been a huge technical and physical lift, something Cloudflare says it has needed to solve for its own operations. With Cloudflare for Offices, the answer is a direct connection to Cloudflare's network — plugging a cable into the box routes all office traffic through Cloudflare's security and performance services. The approach also allows customers to define custom network topologies on Cloudflare's backbone, adding flexibility to the physical footprint of their offices.
A Faster On-Ramp to Zero Trust
The castle-and-moat security model, designed for the desktop era, assumed anyone inside the office was authenticated and required anyone outside to "tunnel" through the moat. The pandemic pushed that model to a parody: everyone was outside the moat, tunneling into an empty castle. The BeyondCorp model pioneered by Google — now known as Zero Trust — flips the assumption: nobody is trusted by default, whether they sit in the office or work from a coffee shop.
Cloudflare for Offices is the physical on-ramp for that architecture. It connects office traffic directly onto Cloudflare's network as part of Cloudflare One, the company's holistic Zero Trust and connectivity platform. Office traffic run over Cloudflare's network gets the same security and visibility benefits as traffic from any other location, without having to traverse the public Internet first.
The approach also supports organizations that are not ready to abandon MPLS overnight. By building a network on top of Cloudflare, a company can shrink its threat surface while keeping existing topologies. Zero Trust can then be adopted incrementally rather than as a risky all-or-nothing migration.
Performance matters here as much as security. Zero Trust solutions route at least a subset of user traffic through the provider's infrastructure, and for some solutions it routes everything. If that provider's point of presence is in the same building as the employee — rather than a distant data center — the latency difference is dramatic. The closer the connection, the more employee productivity is preserved across a fully remote or hybrid workforce.
AMD CTO Mark Papermaster, whose company uses Cloudflare for its over 12,000 employees, called the partnership critical to supporting secure work from home and offices. Garmin's Edge Architect Aaron Dearinger similarly highlighted the potential for productive, secure work anywhere while reducing network costs.
Edge Compute Gets an Office Address
It's not just Zero Trust access that benefits. Cloudflare Workers, the company's serverless platform, runs from the data center nearest to the user making the request. As more business and application logic moves to Workers, endpoint users stand to gain from a data center located in their own office building.
To quantify what that means: the tallest commercial office building in San Francisco, Salesforce Tower, stands 1,070 feet tall. A light signal traversing a single-mode fiber cable from the top of that building to the basement completes the trip in no more than 6 microseconds. Deployments in buildings like it put customers fractions of a millisecond from Cloudflare's network, making the edge nearly indistinguishable in performance from local compute.
Hardware Built for a Building, Not a Data Center
Putting Cloudflare's hardware into an office basement introduces challenges that data center deployments do not face. Cooling constraints matter more, energy efficiency requirements are stricter, and the devices must be resilient enough for a less controlled environment. Cost-effectiveness is also critical because the units will be deployed around the world.
Perhaps the most significant new consideration is physical security. Cloudflare cannot assume the same level of access control inside a building that it enjoys inside a data center. That is why the company has spent the last five years working on hardware security in anticipation of this launch. The advantage of designing and owning its own hardware is the ability to tailor devices to the exact environment, from resiliency to security. The first deployments are switching-focused, with compute and storage capabilities expected on the platform soon.
Cloudflare is inviting organizations in large office buildings, owners and operators of multi-tenant properties, and co-working spaces to reach out if they want Cloudflare's network — and its performance, security, and cost advantages — brought directly to their doorstep.
