Cloudflare has found a way to spread some of its services through the Great Firewall (Golden Shield).
According to Cloudflare, packets crossing the Chinese border often encounter access issues, congestion, loss and delay on their way to the origin server outside China (and vice versa on the way back).
Many aspects of the network in China are often treated separately from the rest of the organization’s global network because of their unique challenges. To solve these problems, Cloudflare works with unknown “local partners” who “route local traffic to a destination in China and global traffic through a secure channel to the nearest available Cloudflare data center outside China.”
Cloudflare is launching its suite of services in this data center, including Firewall-as-a-Service and Secure Web Gateway. Policies applied to these services can then be distributed from the organization’s offices around the world, through the Great Firewall and into Chinese networks.
In theory, this should mean that the organization’s security policies applied elsewhere can be extended to China. In addition, Cloudflare’s efforts to simplify operations in China would be welcomed by international organizations and Chinese companies operating offshore.
It is worth noting that Cloudflare’s Chinese partners would not participate in this cross-border agreement without Beijing’s consent. Otherwise, they would have been penalized. In addition, Cloudflare’s active cooperation with Chinese telecom operators may attract close attention to the company from the U.S. authorities.Cloudflare is an American company providing CDN services, DDoS protection, secure resource access and DNS servers. Thanks to its successful SaaS marketing, the company is one of the 50 Biggest Public SaaS Companies in the U.S.
