Cloudflare recently announced its One Data Protection Suite, a unified set of advanced security solutions designed to protect data across every environment – web, private, and SaaS applications. The company states the suite is powered by Cloudflare’s Security Service Edge (SSE), allowing customers to streamline compliance in the cloud, mitigate data exposure and loss of source code, and secure developer and AI environments from a single platform.
The Data Protection Suite is a converged set of capabilities across Cloudflare products, such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Cloud access security brokers (CASB), Zero Trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), remote browser isolation (RBI), and cloud email security services onto a single platform. The company packaged it and made it part of Cloudflare One.
Overview of Cloudflare One Data Protection (Source: Cloudflare One Data Protection)
With Cloudflare One Data Protection Suite, the company aims to provide organizations with simple, extendable, comprehensive data controls for all aspects of their internal and external applications. Built natively on Cloudflare’s global network, this suite allows organizations to:
- Rapidly incorporate new capabilities and adopt new security standards and protocols to ensure data protection controls effectively cater to modern use cases, such as safeguarding generative AI code.
- Leverage one management interface, providing administrators with multiple, flexible options to send traffic to Cloudflare for enforcement — including API-based scans, clientless deployments of ZTNA and RBI, a single device client, direct or virtual interconnects, and SD-WAN partnerships.
- Use data protection controls through one single-pass inspection across Cloudflare’s network locations.
- Leverage Data Loss Prevention exact data match with the flexibility to detect organization-specific data defined in custom datasets.
- Discover sensitive data at rest and in line. Integrations will cover most cloud collaboration, productivity, and enterprise code repository tools.
- Control access to data and apps based on behavioral user risk scores, incorporating signals from across Cloudflare One, such as user activities, posture, and settings.
Comparable products or services to Cloudflare One Data Protection are, for instance, Microsoft Defender (D365 and Cloud) or Google Cloud Security, which are more specific to their cloud platforms.
In a Cloudflare press release, Tanner Randolph, chief information security officer at Applied Systems, a SaaS technology provider for insurance brokers, said:
Today, Cloudflare One helps prevent our users from sharing sensitive data and code with tools like ChatGPT and Bard, enabling us to take advantage of AI safely. Over the past few years, Cloudflare has been a critical partner in our digital transformation efforts and has helped us consolidate security controls across our users, applications, and networks. Going forward, we are excited about Cloudflare’s continued innovations to protect data and, in particular, their vision and roadmap for services like DLP and CASB.
When asked by InfoQ what is driving the investment from Cloudflare, here is what James Chang, from Cloudflare One, had to say:
Data continues to explode across more environments than security teams can keep track of. This steady trend, accelerated by recent shifts towards hybrid work, DevOps, and generative AI tools, has made it harder than ever to safeguard sensitive data. Organizations need a cybersecurity strategy and partner that adapts to these escalating risks and makes it easier to protect data without slowing down business. Cloudflare One’s data protection suite fills this exact gap by unifying visibility and controls for data everywhere across web, SaaS, and private applications.
In addition, he said:
It is built on and delivered across our own programmable network, enabling us to build new capabilities quickly and address the evolving risks presented by modern coding and increased usage of AI.
Lastly, more details are available in the documentation pages and technical demo.