Joe Sullivan, Chief Security Officer at Cloudflare, Inc., will give a presentation entitled Securing the Cloud - From the Inside Out on Thursday, November 11 from 15:40 pm to 16:00 pm at Cybersecurity Leadership Summit 2021.
To give you a sneak preview of what to expect, we asked Joe some questions about his presentation.
Could you give us a sneak peek into your presentation: “Securing the Cloud - From the Inside Out”
Sure. Hi, I'm really excited to do this presentation. The way I think about it is, you know, there's that old saying "the cloud is just someone else's computer", and in this case, a big part of the cloud is actually the computers that we run for our customers. My number one job at Cloudflare is to make sure that those servers are secure. And so what I'm looking forward to doing is talking about how we approach security of those servers, how we interact with customers on that and how you should be thinking about, when you evaluate companies like Cloudflare.
What does the term "cloud" represent for you and Cloudflare?
Yeah, it's funny. To me, the term cloud represents the concept of making your job easier for you. It's taking one of the burdens of traditional information security and information technology and moving it off of your responsibility and not ours. It used to be that every company, as they grew up, they had to buy more and more servers of their own and dedicate more and more of their own resources to taking care of them. Now, with the cloud, our customers can focus on their core product, and we take care of that infrastructure for them.
What lessons have you learned over the years managing Cloudflare?
Well, people always ask me why I joined Cloudflare, and one of the reasons I joined was because I like going where the internet security issues are. And the internet security issues happen from the kernel on the server all the way up to the network, traffic all the way out to the end-user, and, I have learned that something can go wrong anywhere along the process. It can be a security issue. It could be a performance issue. And you need to have dedicated teams working on all those areas all the time to support our customers well.
How does Cloudflare ensure that privacy and security are delivered despite the immense scale?
Yeah, I think it's, you know, it starts with our mission as a company. At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better internet. And we think about, everyday performance, reliability, security, and privacy. Our business model doesn't involve collecting people's data and making information from it or making money from it. It involves providing security, privacy, and performance at scale. And then a business model comes from that. It's a really neat thing where you get to come to work every day and help make the internet better for everybody else and build a business around it.