Strengthening cloud infrastructure

Basher Bashaireh, Managing Director & Head of Sales Middle East & Turkey at Cloudflare, on the importance of participating at GITEX and the company’s plans for the region.

GITEX 2022

We are really excited to be at GITEX this year. This is the first time for Cloudflare at GITEX and it is great to see so much footfall. We are working on sharing with our customers and decision makers, the latest and the greatest from Cloudflare and also meet with new and existing partners. We are also working on expanding our channel partnership in the region, as the business grows. We’re not just participating as a stand-we have our solutions engineers present here, who make daily presentations where they share how we can help companies on their digital transformation journey. We have been making presentations on how to mitigate botnets. So yes, GITEX has been extremely encouraging and positive so far.

About Cloudflare

With Cloudflare having a really large global Internet footprint-22% of the global traffic goes through Cloudflare-we are very well positioned to help customers mitigate such threats. We also work with customers reduce complexity, reduce cost and respond in a more effective way to threats associated with digital transformation. In fact, this is our theme at GITEX as well.

At Cloudflare, we’re on a mission to provide the fastest, most reliable and most secure Internet experience for all. In fact, our platform offerings revolve around this-we deliver fast content over the Internet, cloud-native cybersecurity products that focus on protecting employees, clients and customers and empowering them. We are present in almost 100+ countries. In each country that we go into, we add more footprint towards implementing our mission. We have 275 data centres around the world, of which 27 are present in the Middle East & Turkey region. We’re working on investing more in this space, adding more data centres as the business demands increase.

In recognition of our market share, we have been recently recognised by Forrester-Wave as the leader in web application firewall. We are the leader in that domain. So basically, this is what differentiates us from the others-we believe firmly in innovation, we had two weeks of innovation announcements that preceded GITEX and lots of releases during that week.

Plans for the region

Almost 60% of our customers are considered large customers and that’s why we are growing, to cope with this. Our plan is to really continue rolling out the Cloudflare platform in the region, which comprises multiple solution offerings. For instance, we recently announced Cloudforce One, which is really capitalising on the huge global network that Cloudflare has. We are going to introduce a new offering which can be availed by customers as a subscription service where they can get from our threat research team the latest reports on the threat scenario. This is a new offering that we’re going to extend to customers in the Middle East & Turkey region.