Cloudflare Publishes Second Annual Impact Report

Report covers a year of expanding free access to security tools, new privacy innovations, and commitments to help build a more sustainable Internet

Cloudflare, Inc, the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, published its second annual Impact Report showcasing its commitment to helping build an Internet that is principled, accessible for everyone, and sustainable. Cloudflare began publicly reporting information about its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts in 2021. This year, the company focused on expanding the value and scope of Cloudflare’s Impact programs; supporting humanitarian and human rights causes, most notably helping protect Ukrainians’ access to the Internet by protecting against DDoS and other cyber attacks; and examining how the company calculates and validates emissions data.

“Cloudflare has built a team of employees dedicated to providing real, positive impact for the millions of users of our services and the billions of Internet users our decisions affect,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “In 2022, the company has jumped into action to help protect people in Ukraine, secure a fair and trusted midterm election so that cyber security was not a headline, and contribute to the development of privacy-enhancing protocols that will ripple far beyond our customers. Whatever next year brings, we’ll be ready to continue ensuring the Internet is accessible, safe, and reliable for all.”

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Highlights of the 2022 Cloudflare Impact Report include:

• Assistance to Ukraine: Cloudflare moved quickly to offer free services and support to Ukrainian government and infrastructure providers. In addition to protecting the .ua top-level domain, Cloudflare currently protects approximately 130 Ukrainian government and infrastructure domains, as well as providing free assistance to 79 Ukrainian nonprofit groups that are helping refugees, documenting war crimes, sharing information, and providing local services.
• Giving back to the Internet: Rate Limiting, a tool that helps defend against bots and a variety of attacks, is available to all customers, including on the Free plan. The open beta of Turnstile provides a more seamless and accessible method for any website owner to confirm visitors are real people without relying on CAPTCHA. In October 2022, we announced that, as a beta service, all websites and APIs served through Cloudflare would support post-quantum hybrid key agreement.
• Democratizing access to Zero Trust: The shift to remote work has further complicated all organizations’ abilities to defend against attacks, protect data, and maintain visibility and security controls over how users move and store data across cloud environments. To further support vulnerable nonprofits, independent journalists, and election administrators, Project Galileo and Athenian Project participants now receive free access to Cloudflare’s suite of Zero Trust protections. A new Impact Initiative, Project Safekeeping, provides free Zero Trust security to small and medium critical infrastructure around the world.
• Engineering privacy into the Internet: This year, Cloudflare pioneered implementation of numerous technologies designed to ensure Internet service providers (ISPs) and other network observers cannot track websites their subscribers visit. Privacy Gateway builds on those efforts by relaying encrypted data packets through our servers to obscure user IP addresses. In 2022, we partnered with a period tracker app to enable Privacy Gateway to prevent the ISP and app from being able to associate individual IP addresses with the tracker.
• Protecting 2,150 vulnerable organizations from an average of 57.9 million cyber threats per day: Founded in 2014, Cloudflare’s Project Galileo provides free cyber security protection to qualified public interest groups like artists, advocates, humanitarian organizations, and the voices of political dissent that face cyber threats in disproportionate numbers.
• Securing small businesses: Small businesses don’t always have the budget for security services; as of December 2022, we identified millions of free accounts responsible for roughly 70 trillion requests over the Cloudflare network in 2022. This is a value of $7 million of content delivery network services that they received at no cost.
• Cloudflare services yield significant emissions savings: Preliminary findings from an upcoming study by Analysys Mason estimate that Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) “generates up to around 90% less carbon than on-premises appliances at low-medium traffic demand.”

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