Resilience, data residency and the agent era — for a national bank
Do not open with this deck. Agenda, permission to ask questions, confirm both agendas — then 15 minutes of discovery with nothing on screen. The brief says discovery and qualification are what they are grading.
"Before I say anything about Cloudflare — I'd rather spend most of this on you, and I've got a lot of questions. [CISO], you own the security policy end to end, employees through to customers. [CFO], you're carrying the cost and the regulatory exposure of whatever he decides. Those two things pull in different directions most of the time. Can I start with where they're pulling hardest right now?"
Press N to hide these notes. O for the slide overview, B to jump to the backup slides, F for fullscreen.
Fifteen years of turning security infrastructure from a capital project into a utility
| 2010 · Public launch at TechCrunch Disrupt Ships with a free tier containing what competitors sold as enterprise hardware. The distribution model, not a marketing tactic. |
| 2011–13 · CDN, WAF and DDoS on the free plan Attack mitigation becomes a default setting rather than an appliance purchase order. Removes the budget cycle from the security decision. |
| 2014 · Universal SSL Free TLS certificates for every customer, including the free tier — roughly doubling the number of encrypted sites on the Internet overnight. |
| 2017 · Workers Serverless on V8 isolates. No cold starts, because the runtime is already warm in every data centre. |
| Apr 2018 · 1.1.1.1 The fastest public DNS resolver, built privacy-first — querying IP addresses are never written to disk, at a time when that data was the obvious way to monetise it. |
| 13 Sept 2019 · IPO, NYSE: NET The balance sheet becomes public. For a regulated buyer, that is what makes a vendor auditable rather than merely trusted. |
| 2020 · Cloudflare One Zero Trust and SASE on one control plane. The end of the VPN concentrator as a single point of failure. |
| 2021 · R2 S3-compatible object storage with no egress fees — removing the industry's toll on moving your own data. |
| 2023 · Workers AI and Vectorize Inference and vector search running in the same data centres the traffic already passes through. RAG without a round trip to a central region. |
| 2025 · Agents SDK and AI Gateway Stateful agents on Durable Objects, and one control point for model cost, caching and observability. |
| Dec 2025 · Replicate acquired 50,000+ production-ready models brought inside the platform, so model choice stops being its own infrastructure project. |
| Apr 2026 · Agent Cloud with OpenAI Managed infrastructure for enterprise agents, and Project Think — durable execution, sub-agents and sandboxed code for long-running tasks. |
| Jul 2026 · Pay-per-answer Publishers are paid when AI uses their content, not merely when a bot fetches it. Cloudflare becomes the toll layer between content and models. |
"Thirty seconds on who we are, then back to you. Cloudflare didn't start as a security company. It started as a project that tracked spam and discovered it could see who was attacking every website on the Internet. That's the whole arc: first we protected that network, then we made it programmable, now we run inference on it."
"The pattern worth noticing is the tag at the bottom of each column. In 2014 TLS certificates were a purchase order — we made them free. DDoS scrubbing was a hardware decision — we made it a default. Egress was a tax on moving your own data — we removed it. Three times, something your predecessors budgeted as a capital project became a line item."
"The IPO matters to you more than to him. Under DORA you have to document an exit strategy for every critical ICT provider — a public balance sheet is what makes that assessment possible rather than a matter of faith."
Every service runs in every data centre — no backhauling, no second-tier regions, single-pass inspection
| Financial services and payments | Visa · SoFi · Stripe · Block |
| Regulated and global enterprise | Roche · Labcorp · Telefónica · Carrefour · Workday · Broadcom · L'Oréal · Mars · Atlassian |
| The AI frontier | Anthropic · OpenAI · CoreWeave · Character.AI · Leonardo.ai |
| Consumer scale | Shopify · Canva · Discord · DoorDash · Uber · Garmin · Indeed |
"I've put our numbers up, which is unusual on a slide about a network. The reason is that DORA makes you document an exit strategy for every critical ICT provider. A supplier with $4.16 billion in cash, 120% net retention and a public filing obligation is a lower-rated concentration risk than a thinly funded one. That's not marketing — it's the assessment your risk team has to produce anyway."
"Four groups, and the first one is the one that matters to you. Visa, SoFi, Stripe and Block are all on this network — regulated, audited, and carrying payment flows. Roche and Labcorp for the data-protection posture. And then the AI labs, which matters for the last slide."
"348 cities, 57 in Europe, Madrid and Barcelona among them. Every one of those servers runs the entire stack — a fifteen-year-old architectural decision, and the reason the rest of this conversation works."
Four problems. Each one is two different problems depending on which chair you sit in — and each has one answer.
| The problem | What the CISO thinks | What the CFO thinks | One answer, for both | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fragmented security | "I have four consoles and four alerting models. I cannot see the whole attack surface, and every audit becomes a reconciliation exercise." | "Four contracts, four renewals, four integration projects — and appliance refresh cycles that arrive whether or not the threat changed." | → | One control plane. Network, security and applications in one console, one contract, and traffic inspected in a single pass rather than bounced between layers. |
| A network built for branches, not for the Internet | "Everything is backhauled to two data centres for inspection, and my remote staff and third parties sit behind a concentrator that is itself the single point of failure." | "I am paying for MPLS circuits and per-seat VPN licences on a workforce that no longer sits in branches." | → | Global scale, locally. 348 cities, 57 in Europe. Under 50ms from 95% of connected users, with inspection at the nearest data centre — so there is nothing to backhaul and no concentrator to size. |
| Operational load | "My specialists spend the week on tunnels, certificates and rule tuning instead of on threat work." | "Headcount is funding maintenance rather than capability. Every new control needs another FTE." | → | Zero Trust without a concentrator. Access granted by identity — no hardware to maintain, no client to roll out, no certificate rotation to schedule. |
| No credible answer for the regulator | "DORA wants evidence of resilience testing, incident timelines and third-party oversight. Assembling it from four vendors takes weeks per cycle." | "Audit and remediation cost rises every cycle, and the concentration-risk register still cannot be closed." | → | Evidence by default. ISO 27001 / 27701 / 27018, PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type II, C5 Type 2, a 100% availability SLA, and the DORA Article 30 mapping published clause by clause. |
"Four problems. I've written each one twice, in your own words, because from where you each sit they are different problems. [CISO], yours is on the left — you can't see the whole surface and you can't prove it on demand. [CFO], yours is in the middle — you're paying four vendors, a circuit bill and an FTE for the privilege. And the right-hand column is one answer, not two, because it is one problem: security, network and compliance were bought as three things and now have to behave as one."
"Those are benchmarks achieved across the firms in the study, not a promise about your bank. The first thing we'd do is build yours against your own baseline."
"Which of those four rows is costing you the most right now?"
Whichever row they pick tells you the entry act, and lets you name the next step from their answer rather than from a template.
Two ways AI shows up: running the network you sit behind, and running the one you build. Each with a pain it removes.
| Capability | The pain today | The value added |
|---|---|---|
| Bot Pattern ML | Credential stuffing and account takeover arrive at volume; CAPTCHAs that stop them also cost conversion | Every request scored against models trained on traffic from 1 in 5 websites on the Internet — a dataset that cannot be bought |
| Speed Brain | Performance tuning is a manual project that is never finished | The model predicts the next navigation and prefetches it. Performance as a decision, not a configuration task |
| WAF Copilot | A new attack pattern waits for a human tuning cycle before anything blocks it | Rules proposed and generated autonomously as patterns appear, with a human approving rather than authoring |
| AI Crawl Control | No visibility of which AI systems read your content, and no mechanism to control it | See every AI crawler, then block it, price it, or be paid per answer it uses |
| Edge PII handling | GenAI programmes stall at one question: where does customer data actually go? | Personal data detected and masked at the edge before it reaches a model, a log, or a third party |
| Capability | The pain today | The value added |
|---|---|---|
| Workers AI | GPU procurement cycles, capacity planning, and cold starts on every idle path | Serverless inference across 348 cities, running where the user already is. No GPUs to buy, no cold starts |
| Replicate | Choosing and hosting models becomes its own infrastructure project | 50,000+ production-ready models inside the platform, swappable without re-architecting |
| Vectorize | RAG round-trips to a central region add latency to every answer | Vector store local to the data centre handling the request — retrieval without the round trip |
| AI Gateway | Model spend is neither budgetable nor observable until the invoice arrives | One control point for caching, rate limiting, cost and observability across any model or provider |
| Agents SDK · Project Think | Agents lose state, cannot run long tasks, and have no audit trail for what they did | Durable execution with state in Durable Objects, sub-agents, sandboxes — and a record of every action taken |
"Two columns, and the left one is the one nobody counts. The AI that operates Cloudflare is trained on traffic from one in five websites on the Internet. That dataset isn't for sale — it's a consequence of having given the CDN away for fifteen years. The right column is what you'd buy: the only place inference runs where your user already is, under fifty milliseconds, without provisioning a single GPU."
"One last thing, and then I'd like to agree a next step. In a few years your customer will not open your app. Their agent will. It will check the balance, move the money, compare your mortgage against three others and switch provider — at machine speed, with no human in the session."
"[CISO], every control you have today assumes a human on the other end: a device, a session, a behavioural pattern, a push notification they'll read. None of that survives an agent. The question that arrives on your desk is one nobody has a policy for yet — how do you tell a legitimate agent acting for your customer from a hostile one wearing their credentials? That isn't a WAF rule. It's an identity problem for non-humans."
"[CFO], the mirror image. When acquisition and churn happen at machine speed, the expensive position isn't being early. It's being the bank whose APIs the agents can't safely transact against — because they'll route around you, and you'll see it in the numbers two quarters after it started."
"Cloudflare sits in front of one in five websites on the Internet. We're watching this shift happen before it reaches anyone's dashboard. I'm not asking you to believe a roadmap — I'm offering you the vantage point. And the first step is small."
Name no product in the close. The concept carries it, and a concept can't be fact-checked against a roadmap.
So that whatever we conclude, you end up with a document your own teams can use
| Who would need to be there | Time | What we would check together |
|---|---|---|
| Head of Network or Infrastructure with our Solutions Engineer | 90 min one session | The current traffic path, and where inspection happens today |
| Security architecture lead | same session | Third-party and contractor access, and what still reaches origin |
| Whoever owns the vendor contracts procurement or FP&A | 30 min separate | Renewal dates, and where the spend sits across the four vendors |
| Yourselves CISO and CFO | 30 min two weeks later | The written findings — and whether they justify a next step at all |
The brief says the goal is to get them to commit to the next stage. A commitment is easiest to give when the ask is specific, dated, cheap and reversible — and when the deliverable has value even if they never buy.
It is one, but naming it turns a conversation into a process and invites procurement into the room three weeks early. Present it as "who would need to be there" and let them recognise the shape.
"Whoever owns the vendor contracts" with their renewal dates. That is the only row that gives you a calendar — and a calendar is what turns this from interest into a forecastable opportunity. Ask for it casually.
"Before we start, I'd want you to pick the one number this has to move. Not me — you. Otherwise we'll both declare it a success and nothing will happen."
Press B or arrow right. Resilience, then GDPR and e-Privacy. Do not go there unprompted — wait to be asked.
What happens when something breaks outside your perimeter, inside it, or at Cloudflare
| Volumetric DDoS on payment rails Mitigated at the data centre nearest the attacker, across all 348 cities. No scrubbing centre, nothing hauled to a central site. Capacity is the whole network, not an appliance. |
| ISP, BGP or subsea degradation Anycast plus 13,000+ interconnections. Traffic reroutes around the fault; Argo Smart Routing actively avoids congested and brown-out paths. |
| A cloud region or third-party API fails Load balancing with health checks fails over across clouds and on-prem. Cloud-agnostic by design. |
| Traffic surge — payday, market event Waiting Room queues in a controlled way instead of letting the service collapse. |
| Origin or data centre unreachable Always Online and Cache Reserve serve a usable version while the origin is down. |
| VPN concentrator saturated or down Zero Trust access by identity — no concentrator exists to fail, and no client rollout to coordinate. |
| Origin exposed in order to be reachable Cloudflare Tunnel — outbound-only connection, no inbound ports open. |
| Appliance refresh and maintenance windows The control plane is the network. There is no hardware to fail over between. |
| No single point of failure Every service in every one of 348 cities. A failed location is absorbed by its neighbours — the failure domain is a city, not the service. |
| 100% availability SLA on Enterprise, with remedies and a credit process, incorporated into the Terms of Service. |
| TLPT participation — committed under DORA Articles 26–27. |
| Unrestricted audit rights for you, your appointed third party, and the competent authority. |
| Supply-chain transparency — published sub-processor list, 30 days' notice, right to object. Cloudflare is liable for its sub-processors. |
| Exit strategy, Art. 30(3)(f) — services continue for a pre-defined transition period after termination, on request. |
"There are three versions of that question and I want to answer all three, because the third is the one your regulator will ask: failure outside your perimeter, failure inside it, and failure at Cloudflare."
"Most vendors answer that with an uptime number. The number matters, but it isn't the answer. The answer is architectural: we don't try to prevent failure, we assume it. Every one of 348 cities runs the entire stack, so when a location fails its neighbours absorb it and the failure domain is a city rather than the service."
"And then the part you didn't ask: adding us makes us a critical third party, and DORA makes that your problem to document. So we published the Article 30 mapping clause by clause, we commit to your threat-led penetration testing, we give your regulator unrestricted audit rights, and we contractually keep serving you through a transition period after termination so your exit plan is real. I'd rather hand you that than let your risk team find it in week six."
Column 3 is the one that wins the room.
Cloudflare Data Localization Suite — and why privacy here is a business model rather than a feature
| Regional Services You choose the region where TLS is decrypted and where WAF, CDN and Workers execute. Inspection stays in the EU. |
| Geo Key Manager / Keyless SSL Private TLS keys stored only in the geography you specify — or kept in your own infrastructure, never shared with us. |
| Customer Metadata Boundary Logs and metadata do not leave your specified region. |
| Durable Objects jurisdiction restrictions Serverless state pinned to a region, so what you build is regionally confined by construction. |
| DDoS mitigated at the nearest data centre Attack traffic is dropped locally. Nothing is shipped out of region to be scrubbed. |
| Your data stays yours You retain all IP rights. Logpush exports to storage you control, during and after the contract. |
| Zaraz Moves third-party tags off the browser and onto the edge, gated by consent. Analytics and marketing tags stop firing before the customer agrees, and stop leaking data to vendors directly from the browser. |
| Page Shield Shows every script actually running on your banking portal and alerts on change — the client-side visibility that e-Privacy and the PCI DSS 4.0 client-side script requirements both depend on. |
| Edge PII handling Detects and masks personal data at the edge before it reaches a log, a model or a third party. |
"Those are two different problems and they get conflated. GDPR is about where the data goes and who can touch it. e-Privacy is about what fires in your customer's browser before they consent. Cloudflare has a different answer for each, and the second one is the one almost nobody shows you."
1. Say "supports the PCI DSS 4.0 client-side script requirements" and never a requirement number.
2. Say "you choose the region where inspection happens" rather than naming specific EU locales. The right answer to "is Spain supported?" is "I'll send you the current locale list today" — also a follow-up reason to email them.
3. Never say Cloudflare guarantees their compliance. Phrase it as "these are the controls that let your DPO sign it off" — a CISO trusts that more, because they know a guarantee isn't a vendor's to give.