CIO Week 2023: Security That Keeps Up With the Business
The CIO’s mandate is deceptively simple: the systems must work. When they do, nobody notices. When they don't, it's a crisis. Underneath that quiet expectation sits a stack of contradictions — robust security that users never feel, rapid connectivity for a distributed workforce, and a budget that never quite stretches to cover the rising cost of point solutions. All of this is compounded by the pressure to modernize for hybrid work models, moving applications and infrastructure forward at a pace that wasn't necessary even a few years ago.
Those modernization efforts are rarely just about technology. CIOs own digital transformation strategies that reach every part of the business, from cloud migrations to new data analytics capabilities. Speed is the objective, but it can't be purchased with weaker security. The complication is that layering on new tools often adds overhead and administrative burden. Products with separate management interfaces, inconsistent behavior across locations, and poor integrations consume valuable time just to make them work together.
The answer we've found is to build for composability — products that deliver value in isolation but more when they work as a system. The technical term we use internally is "bringing the glue." Announcing a feature is one thing; demonstrating how it creates benefits that could not be obtained from siloed products is another. That is the focus of this week's announcements: showing how a natively integrated platform lets you accelerate a digital strategy without sacrificing control.
Where Zero Trust Meets the Network
As applications, users, and data have moved outside the traditional corporate perimeter, the castle-and-moat model no longer applies. The newer architectural frameworks gaining traction — SASE and Zero Trust — advocate for unifying networking and security controls under a single cloud-based control plane. The business case is straightforward: broader visibility and more granular control over traffic regardless of where it originates or terminates.
With Cloudflare One, we've built a SASE platform that connects employees to our global network, where security policies can inspect and govern traffic between on-premises infrastructure, clouds, and everything in between. Over the course of CIO Week, we're announcing new capabilities that move the single-vendor SASE concept from aspiration to practical reality.
Partners and the Path to Modernized Security
Long-term transformation requires the right people around you. That's why we've invested heavily in our partner ecosystem — technology alliances, channel partners, and system integrators — to give CIOs deployment options that fit their organization's culture and constraints. The results show up in initiatives like the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project and our partnership with Yubico, which brings security keys to organizations at a fraction of the usual cost.
We've also noticed that partners are engaging on deeper, longer-term projects around Cloudflare One. This week, we're sharing more about opportunities to build Zero Trust strategies around our platform and a deeper technical integration with Microsoft.
The Control Plane for a Multi-Cloud World
Multi-cloud strategies tend to focus on application placement — planning how to move workloads with efficiency and speed. Often underappreciated is the connectivity layer that binds it all together: the highway between on-premises data centers, clouds, IoT devices, and challenging regions. That global network fabric needs to be consistent and identity-neutral, or everything on top of it slows to a crawl.
Cloudflare's role here is that of a neutral control plane. We don't compete with your cloud providers; we secure and accelerate the traffic between them and your users. Announcements this week will show our architecture applied seamlessly across multiple cloud environments, enabling CIOs to manage infrastructure securely regardless of the provider.
From Someone Who Uses the Products Daily
Many of the announcements this week are not hypothetical — they're the tools our own CIO's team uses daily. Cloudflare is Customer Zero for essentially everything we ship. Before asking any organization to trust our network with their security and data, we've stress-tested the products in our own environment via our "Dog Fooding" culture of using our own products.
Balancing budget constraints with strategic investments is a problem every CIO knows. But few get to sit on the product side of that equation. When you hear from our CIO and other technology leaders from customer organizations this week, the goal is straightforward: to show you how this platform solves real problems and then invite you to test it yourself. Welcome to CIO Week 2023.
