[TechSparks 2020] How to build a cost-effective network that is better, faster, and reliable

The world around us is changing more rapidly than we anticipated. Along with such rapid growth, the demand for a modern digital consumer keeps changing and growing. It is thus the role of the enterprises to keep up with the pace and scale their infrastructure.

But how can one do it?

Explaining this, Nidhi Mishra, Solutions Engineer APAC, Cloudflare gave insights into the forces that are driving this change and how companies can create value and compute in the space of performance and security.

In the masterclass session at TechSparks 2020 on ‘Staying agile, cost-effective while delivering superior service’, she spoke about some of the major concerns regarding network applications and the key measures to solve them.

ALSO READ

[TechSparks 2020] Why founders should keep brand thinking in mind while starting a company

How Cloudflare can help grow businesses

The mission of Cloudflare is to build a better internet that is faster, more secure, and more reliable. To achieve this, it has built a global cloud platform that helps organisations secure and accelerate their applications and also their employee access.

“As of today, our network covers 200+ cities in more than 100 countries. This means that essentially, we have a very robust and holistic view on global security threat. We can thus help companies mitigate risks even better,” Nidhi said.

“In terms of performance, this provides a global anycast network which will make sure the applications stay updated, delivers faster and can make the content reach better to the end-users,” she added.

Nidhi further threw light on some of the factors which make companies chose Cloudflare. This includes shared intelligence, its network architecture/scale, ease of use and no trade-offs.

She said,

“We deliver a network scale performance within 100ms for 99 percent of the population. Our unified control plane breaks silos from tools and avoid cloud vendor lock-in. Our platform is easy to implement, configure and manage.”

Additionally, it also claims to have developed a defence system that leverages shared intelligence against massive cyber attacks.

Some of the popular organisations that use Cloudflare solutions are BookMyShow, Udaan, Wikipedia, Carousell, etc.

Digital transformation trends

Digital transformation has become a buzzword now. According to Nidhi, it is a key driver on how organisations create value for their customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

“Today, a lot of businesses are born in the cloud. This gives them more advantage. They have more momentum, are agile, and are pacing fast towards the growth by allowing those changes to happen pretty quickly.”

According to her, there are three main components to look at – namely, the network, application, store/compute – each of which has seeing changes over the years.

While buying hardware or software had been a trend, people today have moved to cloud services based on subscription models. Another trend she elaborated is the shift from a data-centric approach to a user-centric one.

“The data-centric and appliance-based approach is broken and has implications for business applications and remote workforce. It is expensive, has increased risks and scalability issues,” Nidhi explained.

She then referred to a report by Gartner that predicts 40 percent of the enterprises will adopt Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) by 2024. A SASE approach is a cloud-native solution focused on user-centric security that provides ‘Network as a Service’ and ‘Network Security as a Service.’

Cloudflare, which claims to be one of the leading solutions for SASE, offers components in SASE as an integrated cloud-native platform with additional solutions including serverless application platform, insights and Cloudflare API.

ALSO READ

[TechSparks 2020] Why data privacy protection is important for all businesses

Security risks

“Our vision is to empower teams of any size and technical sophistication so that they can keep the internet probability safe and secure without sacrificing speed and performance. Our goal is to secure any combination of platforms,” Nidhi said.

She highlighted some of the common challenges that companies look for in terms of security. This includes how to protect its internet applications from attacks and vulnerabilities such as malicious fraud, and how to protect the underlining network infrastructure in a way that is fast and secure.

She also underlined that the security is as much about keeping the bad guys out as it is enabling the good guys to get in.

Nidhi then reflects on the solutions to solve these problems.

“On the application side, some of the measures to protect the web application include a combination of firewall, DDoS protection, and bot management. This provides well-rounded security for applications against all layer and bot attacks.”

To protect the entire network, Nidhi suggested securing the network infrastructure of the organisation.

She also advised to not automatically trust anything – be it inside or outside the perimeters – and to verify everything that is trying to connect to systems before granting access. This, according to her, will help protect the enterprises.

TechSparks - YourStory's annual flagship event - has been India's largest and most important technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship summit for over a decade, bringing together entrepreneurs, policymakers, technologists, investors, mentors, and business leaders for stories, conversations, collaborations, and connections that matter. As TechSparks 2020 goes all virtual and global in its 11th edition, we want to thank you for the tremendous support we've received from all of you throughout our journey and give a huge shoutout to our sponsors of TechSparks 2020.