Regional Services expands to three Asia Pacific markets
Cloudflare has extended its Regional Services offering to India, Japan and Australia, making the data localization controls available to customers in those countries for the first time. The launch follows growing demand from Asia Pacific customers for tools that let them restrict where traffic is decrypted and inspected, a requirement that has become increasingly common outside the European Union since the Data Localization Suite was first announced in 2020.
Regional Services is designed for customers who need to honor regulatory requirements or contractual obligations that specify exactly where traffic can be processed. Under normal operation, Cloudflare uses its entire anycast network to service traffic, applying Layer 7 functions such as WAF, Bot Management and Workers at whatever data center is closest to the user. Regional Services changes that model: customers select the regions where decryption may occur, and any data center outside those regions forwards the raw TCP stream — still encrypted — to a data center inside the permitted region. Only there is traffic decrypted and passed through products that require inspection.
The routing problem Regional Services solves
Cloudflare's network is built on anycast, where all data centers advertise the same IP addresses via Border Gateway Protocol. That design is beneficial for performance — users reach the nearest data center from a network perspective — and for DDoS mitigation, since volumetric attacks are spread across the whole network. But anycast has no awareness of national borders. An Internet Service Provider can route traffic to a data center in a different country even when a local one exists. A customer in Kerala, for instance, might have traffic routed to Colombo, Sri Lanka, because that path looks faster from the ISP's point of view.
With Regional Services enabled, each data center knows which region it belongs to. When traffic arrives at a data center outside the customer's chosen region, that data center does not decrypt it. Instead, it forwards the encrypted stream onward until it reaches a data center inside the designated region, where decryption and all Layer 7 products are applied as if the traffic had arrived directly.
India, Japan and Australia now live
Interest in Regional Services has historically been concentrated in the European Union and the Americas. Cloudflare says it has seen a marked increase in demand from the Asia Pacific region over the past few years, and after reviewing customer feedback and applicable regulations identified India, Japan and Australia as the three most important markets to support first. All three are now generally available.
