Cloudflare, in plain English

Cloudflare is a connectivity cloud that helps you connect your people and systems, protect everything you expose to the Internet, and build modern apps right on its global network. Think of it as one place to speed up your sites and internal tools, lock down access, kill bots and DDoS, and ship new features fast—without juggling a dozen vendors. (cloudflare.com)

Why back-office teams care

• Fewer vendors, fewer tickets. One control plane to manage networking, access, security, and logs means less handoff between teams and simpler runbooks. (cloudflare.com)

• Faster, safer employee access. Replace aging VPNs with Zero Trust access and consistent policies for staff and contractors, wherever they work. (cloudflare.com)

• Operational resilience. Built on a huge anycast network that absorbs big traffic spikes and attacks so finance, HR, and ERP apps stay available. (cloudflare.com)

• Predictable costs. Generous free tiers, pay‑as‑you‑go for compute, and storage with no egress fees keep budgets sane. (cloudflare.com)

Connectivity: modernize and secure your network

• Zero Trust + SASE (Cloudflare One). Enforce identity‑ and device‑aware policies for private apps, SaaS, and the web; cut VPN reliance; apply data controls; and route traffic over Cloudflare’s network. Analysts recognize Cloudflare in SASE/Zero Trust market evaluations. (cloudflare.com)

• Network services at the edge. Options like secure tunnels, secure web gateway, CASB, DLP, RBI, and email security integrate into one policy framework and dashboard. Set once, apply everywhere. (developers.cloudflare.com)

• Quantum‑safe posture. The platform emphasizes modern encryption and forward‑looking security as part of its Zero Trust stack. (cloudflare.com)

Protection: keep sites, apps, APIs, and users safe

• Web Application Firewall (WAF). Managed rules + ML detection protect against the latest exploits and zero‑days; easy to turn on and manage. At peak, Cloudflare’s network processes over 100M HTTP requests per second, feeding strong threat intelligence. (cloudflare.com)

• DDoS protection. Always‑on, automatic mitigation that has blocked record‑setting, hyper‑volumetric attacks—so your public sites and APIs stay online during peak season or incident response. (blog.cloudflare.com)

• Bot management. ML + behavioral signals to stop credential stuffing, scraping, scalping, and other automated abuse—without beating up real users with puzzles. (cloudflare.com)

• Human-friendly verification. Turnstile replaces CAPTCHAs with a privacy‑preserving, mostly invisible check to keep flows fast and accessible. (blog.cloudflare.com)

• Control AI crawlers. Default blocking and “pay‑per‑crawl” options help you manage how AI bots access your content. Good for brand, legal, and infra costs. (reuters.com)

• Fast DNS and CDN. Authoritative DNS and a global CDN improve performance and uptime for everything customer‑ and employee‑facing. (cloudflare.com)

Build: ship apps, automations, and AI right on the network

• Cloudflare Workers (serverless). Deploy functions and full apps globally in seconds—no regions, no cold starts, and instant scaling across 330+ cities. Great for back-office automations, secure webhooks, and API gateways. (workers.cloudflare.com)

• Data + storage, without egress fees. Use R2 object storage (zero egress), KV, Durable Objects, D1 SQL, and queues to keep data close to your users and control costs across clouds. No surprise bandwidth bills. (developers.cloudflare.com)

• AI, safely. Run inference at the edge with Workers AI, centralize usage and routing with AI Gateway, and add Firewall for AI to catch prompt injection and data‑leak risks—so teams can adopt AI with guardrails. (cloudflare.com)

Scale and reliability, by the numbers

• Global reach: Services run in 330+ cities to keep latency low for distributed teams and customers. (workers.cloudflare.com)

• Traffic intelligence: WAF powered by traffic volumes exceeding 100M HTTP requests/sec at peak. (cloudflare.com)

• Proven DDoS defense: In 2025 Q2, Cloudflare automatically mitigated attacks peaking at 7.3 Tbps and 4.8 Bpps, with thousands of hyper‑volumetric events handled. (blog.cloudflare.com)

• Attack telemetry: In 2025 Q1 alone, Cloudflare blocked 20.5M DDoS attacks, informing smarter defaults for everyone. (blog.cloudflare.com)

Cost and time-to-value

• Start free, deploy in minutes. Turn on core protections and performance quickly; many orgs start with DNS, CDN, and WAF, then add Zero Trust access as policies mature. (cloudflare.com)

• Pay for what you use. Serverless pricing for Workers and generous free quotas help teams experiment before scaling up. (developers.cloudflare.com)

• Eliminate egress tax. Offload static assets, logs, and AI datasets to R2 to simplify multicloud and cost management. (developers.cloudflare.com)

Where it fits in a solid back office

• Secure access to internal systems. Put ERP, HRIS, finance tools, and admin portals behind Zero Trust policies; remove broad network access and legacy VPN friction. (cloudflare.com)

• Protect public‑facing portals. Combine CDN, WAF, bot management, and Turnstile to harden customer and partner portals without hurting UX. (cloudflare.com)

• Standardize data flows. Use Workers + R2 to automate file intake, report generation, and API fan‑out jobs with reliable queues and scheduled runs. (developers.cloudflare.com)

• Adopt AI with policy. Route AI requests through AI Gateway, set data‑use rules, and enforce Firewall for AI so employees can use AI tools safely. (workers.cloudflare.com)

• Resilience and compliance. Fast DNS, anycast routing, and always‑on DDoS mitigation support business continuity and audit‑friendly controls. (cloudflare.com)

A simple rollout plan

• Week 1: Move DNS to Cloudflare, enable CDN caching and WAF managed rules on key domains. (cloudflare.com)

• Week 2: Pilot Zero Trust access for 1–2 internal apps; add device posture checks. (developers.cloudflare.com)

• Week 3: Turn on Bot Management and Turnstile on customer‑facing forms and