Company: NET
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001477333-25-000043
Chunk: 16

Company: Cloudflare, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 16
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Item 1. Business

Overview

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet.

Over the past decade, the technology industry has been undergoing a massive transition from on-premises hardware and software that customers buy, to services in the cloud that they rent. Organizations find themselves at different points in this transition to the cloud. Regardless of where organizations are in their transition, they all face a common set of challenges: they exist in a complex, heterogeneous infrastructure environment which exacerbates the fundamental problems of the Internet more than ever, and the on-premises hardware boxes that they once relied upon to solve these problems were never designed to work in such an environment. As more workloads move to the cloud and workforces become increasingly distributed globally, there is no point in installing additional hardware boxes on premise. An on-premises box will not solve the problems organizations now face. Nor can a business ship a hardware box to a cloud vendor. Even if they wanted to, there is literally no place to install such a box in the cloud.

The result is that a major architectural shift at the network layer is underway. Previously, enterprises would often string together a diverse set of on-premises hardware boxes from different vendors to solve their network challenges. As these solutions move to the cloud, the network latency, support complexity, and cost of overhead makes stringing together multiple point-cloud solutions that only address specific network needs also untenable. Customers are therefore looking to consolidate behind a single, global provider that operates in the cloud — what has been described as a “Connectivity Cloud".

Cloudflare is a leader in this Connectivity Cloud category. We deliver a broad range of services to businesses of all sizes and in all geographies — making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual network hardware. Our network serves as a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. We serve comprehensive customer needs across security and connectivity, and increasingly, the distributed and programmable nature of our network is resulting in customers building their applications on top of our network, too — including both traditional applications and those that are enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI).

Our Network

We have built an efficient, scalable, programmable network that allows us to rapidly develop and deploy our products for our customers and that is architected to be flexible, scalable, and get more and