Why Enterprise Connectivity Is a Sore Subject
Corporate networking remains one of the most stubborn bottlenecks for IT teams. While the industry fixates on cutting-edge applications and employee experience tools, the unglamorous work of adding capacity or reconfiguring branches still consumes disproportionate time and effort. Conversations with CIOs consistently surface the same frustration: managing organizational connectivity is too slow, too manual, and too geographically constrained.
Cloudflare's answer to this problem has three components: increasing the value of interconnecting with its network, expanding physical reach to more locations, and slashing provisioning times from months to minutes.
The Value of Plugging In
Cloudflare's security, reliability, and performance products run from a global network, so the benefits of connection extend well beyond mere transport. Customers who interconnect gain access to these services without added latency and with simplified configuration. Private paths are available from Magic Transit straight to datacenters, bypassing the public Internet entirely. The private backbone can also deliver performance gains across an entire corporate network.
The network itself becomes more useful with every new connection. Cloudflare protects more than 28 million Internet properties, and the broader its reach, the better its threat detection—an immune system that improves as it encounters new pathogens. Free customers and 1.1.1.1 users contribute visibility that sharpens network performance. Each new customer strengthens the ecosystem, and the growth of that ecosystem benefits everyone already connected.
Expanding Where Connections Happen
Modern enterprise networks are not homogeneous. They span datacenters, branch offices, remote workers, factories, and other distributed locations. To serve such diversity, Cloudflare offers interconnection across approximately 250 locations worldwide, with plans to enable 1,000 additional interconnection points over the next year as part of its Cloudflare for Offices initiative.
Datacenter Reach
Direct interconnection is available in over 250 global locations, with more detail published on the organization's PeeringDB page. A growing list of Interconnect Partners offers further points of presence, enabling easier connections for customers who already have datacenter footprint in partner facilities.
Bringing Connectivity to Branch Offices
Cloudflare for Offices extends the network edge into office buildings and multi-dwelling residences. The aim is for on-premise traffic to plug directly into private, performant access to Cloudflare One services—meaning Gateway queries avoid the public Internet before reaching Cloudflare, Magic WAN gets more private, and Argo for Packets improves office performance.
Location selection is not arbitrary. Two criteria guide building evaluation:
- Existing telecom connectivity: Buildings must already be connected to the Internet via one or more telecom partners. Laying new fiber introduces unacceptable delays when the goal is rapid provisioning.
- Multi-tenant occupancy in large metro areas: Initial expansion targets buildings with many potential or existing customers. Single-tenant sites may come later, but starting with high-density locations maximizes early impact.
Once a building is selected, Cloudflare coordinates with building operators and network providers to deliver connectivity to tenants. The process is still complex, but the standardization effort aims to make connection feel the same regardless of location—eventually just a matter of plugging in.
Compressing Provisioning Cycles
The traditional interconnection path is notoriously slow. Customers wait for letters of authorization, contract remote hands to plug cables, read light levels, and only then begin configuring software. Industry-standard timelines run to weeks. Cloudflare's goal is minutes, and the company is pursuing three main avenues to get there: automated BGP configuration, streamlined cross-connect provisioning, and stronger link monitoring.
Instant BGP Session Turnup
A cross-connected cable is only part of the equation. BGP sessions are the control plane that tells traffic a new private path exists between two networks. Cloudflare now provisions BGP sessions at the time cross-connects are ordered, so sessions are up and ready before configuration begins. This parallelizes work that previously happened sequentially, cutting substantial time out of the process.
Cross-Connect Provisioning and Partners
The physical side of cross-connects remains a bottleneck. Booking human time, filling purchase orders, and completing methods of procedure (MOP) documents are all part of the process—without guarantees that someone won't accidentally disrupt a cable during maintenance.
To address this, Cloudflare is standardizing datacenter connectivity to make it obvious where cables should be plugged in. Patch panels are being used more extensively, allowing operators to interconnect without entering cages, thereby reducing both complexity and the risk of accidental downtime during maintenance.
Interconnect Partners offer another path forward, leveraging existing Cloudflare connectivity to provide virtual interconnection. This list of partners continues to expand, offering customers software-defined alternatives to physical cross-connects.
"Megaport's participation in Cloudflare Network Interconnect as an Interconnection Platform Partner helps make connectivity easier for our mutual customers. Reducing the time it takes for customers to go live with new Virtual Cross Connects and Megaport Cloud Routers helps them realize the promise of software-defined networking."
— Peter Gallagher, Head of Channel, Megaport
"Console Connect and Cloudflare are continuing our partnership as part of Cloudflare's Network Interconnect program, helping our mutual customers enhance the performance and control of their network through Software-Defined Interconnection®. As more and more customers move from physical to virtual connectivity, our partnership will help shorten onboarding times and make interconnecting easier than ever before."
— Michael Glynn, VP of Digital Automated Innovation, Console Connect
Monitoring with BFD
Uptime trumps all. For customers who cannot tolerate packet loss, Cloudflare now offers Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) support on physical CNI links. BFD sends a constant traffic stream across a session, detecting failures within seconds if packets stop arriving. This provides fast, deterministic failover decisions for CNI customers with strict low-loss requirements.
A Faster Path to a Better Network
The pattern Cloudflare has established—taking on edge computing, building a better routing path, delivering zero trust networking—now extends to the interconnection layer itself. The hard problems on the Internet, like securing what belongs to you, should not be compounded by slow and painful connectivity setup. For customers interested in Cloudflare Network Interconnect or Cloudflare for Offices, more details are available on the organization's landing page.
