Cloudflare recently announced the general availability of all elements of its single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) platform — Cloudflare One. Product Manager Annika Garbers said the vendor's homegrown approach meets the market demand for simplicity, cost-effectiveness and unified management.

Cloudflare launched its Cloudflare One SASE platform in 2020, which included the secure web access gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (Cloud Access Security Broker), and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) capabilities. It offers network edge features through its Magic WAN SD-WAN alternative, along with its Network On-Ramp partnerships with SD-WAN vendors, including Aruba Networks, VMWare, Arista Networks, Cisco, and SonicWall.

Cloudflare introduced its Magic WAN service in 2021. The software-defined underlay is built on the company’s massive private backbone network and designed to replace slow and expensive MPLS connections.

The latest addition to the platform was the Magic WAN Connector, which is an open-source software-defined package designed to help customers more easily connect their network to Cloudflare.

“All of those components actually were developed by Cloudflare from scratch, from the ground up,” Garbers told SDxCentral. “We acquired a small CASB startup around a year-and-a-half ago, but really worked with them to develop the majority of the CASB components that are in our platform today with their team to integrate natively with the Cloudflare platform.”

“So we've taken a different approach than other companies in this space, who've maybe acquired the components and stitched them together. We think it's really important for the integrated platform to have all of the pieces built to integrate from day one,” she added.

Cloudflare’s SASE is built on its extensive backbone and global network, which operates in 300 cities in over 100 countries and interconnects 12,500 networks.

Garbers noted every Server across this network runs a full stack of security services, including traditional Application services, firewalls, DDoS prevention and bot management. “Every single one of those points of presence also runs the full zero-trust security stack and the full network connectivity stack as well.”

Cloudflare unifies SASE adoption to address customer needs

Customer feedback has consistently shown that they care about the cost of the overall solution, the consolidation to get all the components from one vendor, and the ease of use and management, according to Garbers.

“We just heard consistent feedback, after that initial launch, that people just want one easy [solution] like things that they can drop in that will automatically set up that connectivity for them,” she said.

That’s why Cloudflare’s SASE platform offers one control plane for all the different functions, she added. “One of the reasons that we took that integrated approach not only on the back end technology side but also on the user experience, because we don't think it makes sense for customers to have to switch back and forth between different portals for different products to be able to administer these functions that really have so many overlapping and integrating capabilities.”

Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming also said in an interview that the key to a single-vendor SASE is for the vendor to provide unified management across all SASE capabilities.

Single-vendor SASE competition heats up

In its first-ever Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Single-Vendor SASE report, Gartner named Cloudflare as one of the honorable mentions, meaning it didn’t meet the inclusion criteria as of the research cutoff date of April 12, 2023.

The analysis firm identified Palo Alto Networks as the only leader; Cato Networks, Versa Networks and Fortinet as challengers; Cisco and Forcepoint as visionaries; and VMware and Juniper Networks as niche players.

Meanwhile, it mentioned the vendors in the honorable mentions all made their move to offer single-vendor SASE. Cloudflare launched branch appliances, Check Point recently added SD-WAN capabilities to its portfolio, Cradlepoint acquired cloud security vendor Ericom, HPE (Aruba) bought security services edge (SSE) vendor Axis Security and Netskope acquired cloud-networking vendor Infiot.

The SASE competition definitely is heating up, Garbers said. “I think everyone sees the opportunity here and we're all hearing the same message from customers, which is consolidation, lower cost, easier use and, and helped me solve these visibility and security gaps, so it makes sense that we're all moving in the right direction.”

However, she pointed out that as noted by Gartner, some vendors currently included in the single-vendor SASE MQ report still struggle with disjointed interfaces and components.

Garbers touted Cloudflare's differentiator lies in its unified platform, offering customers a seamless experience by eliminating the need to juggle multiple control planes. Meanwhile, unlike dual-vendor SASE solutions, Cloudflare's approach ensures control over the “middle mile” of the Internet, addressing challenges posed by intermediary transit providers and enhancing the dependability of the Internet as a corporate backbone.

“The fact that we also have this integrated Application security portfolio, and then also our developer platform that lets you use the entire thing to really composedly and actually program the entire stack and run your own edge functions, I think is also going to be beneficial to customers,” she said.