Equinix® and Cloudflare Deliver Secure Digital Infrastructure Interconnection

Enterprises are rapidly responding to the opportunities and challenges presented by hybrid and multicloud architectures. Organizations successfully making this transition are implementing an edge strategy that places strategic security control points closer to users, clouds and networks.

Evolving enterprise architectures toward the edge requires effective security and privacy safeguards at the front doors of both the internet and the enterprise. Organizations must also secure their applications and data and conform with both company-mandated and governmental compliance regulations.

To ensure security and privacy safeguards, enterprises must replicate equivalent controls to those traditionally implemented onsite (or within a private domain)—but do so in a cloud-oriented context. A new set of security safeguards and an emerging “zero-trust” model is required to protect enterprises as the digital transformation to an integrated cloud-focused infrastructure progresses.

Challenges

Traditional IT architectures have consolidated infrastructure and localized services and traffic around centralized “cores.” However, the hybrid multicloud shift has upended enterprise architectures and distributed them out to the edge. Centralized cores can no longer protect increasingly heterogenous and complex enterprise environments. Instead, a distributed approach to providing security throughout your IT domain, particularly at the edge of your digital infrastructure, will better protect against threats in a hybrid environment. This exposure can be mitigated in several ways:

• Enforce security policies from a single pane of glass, across all enterprise domains, including on-premises capabilities. Convert this higher level of visibility into relevant action through consistent security policy enforcement.
• While security policy creation can be centralized, policy enforcement across the corporate network can require updating individual appliances.
• As more software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and cloud workloads move to the edge, policy enforcement must leverage the same highly scalable solutions as policy creation.
• Network architects must design solutions that protect data from potential exposure while ensuring proper access to that data in a way that constrains access to authorized users and systems.

Extending secure hybrid interconnection through collaboration

To meet evolving enterprise security and hybrid multicloud requirements, an enterprise must respond with a comprehensive, cloud-integrated approach that replicates or improves upon previous security postures. The best-of-breed solution embodied by Equinix Fabric and Cloudflare helps to accomplish this.

Our collaboration with Cloudflare, as a part of the Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI) program, enables customers to more easily gain access to Cloudflare’s 200+ globally distributed POPs, ensuring security solutions are as close as possible to your infrastructure. These solutions include Cloudflare’s Magic Transit DDoS mitigation service, content delivery network services and distributed domain name server services.

As part of CNI, Equinix Fabric™ allows mutual Equinix and Cloudflare customers to interconnect directly and privately to Cloudflare—even when an organization is not physically located in the same data center as Cloudflare. Joint Equinix Fabric and Cloudflare customers can order a port and a virtual connection via the Equinix Fabric Customer Portal to establish a connection to Cloudflare’s network. Multiple virtual connections can also be established with the Cloudflare network via that single port.

Equinix Fabric Integration with Cloudflare Services Infrastructure

As part of Cloudflare’s CNI initiative, Equinix Fabric enables customers to interconnect branch and headquarters locations privately and securely with Cloudflare solutions wherever they are situated, thereby enabling seamless access to Cloudflare’s full suite of network functions independent of physical location.

By using Equinix Fabric to interconnect to Cloudflare, enterprises are ensured access to heightened security, reliability and performance benefits in comparison to the other public internet access strategies. Measurable benefits include:

• Placing content closer to online visitors via Equinix Fabric with CNI lowers latency to improve cache fill performance and reduce costs.
• Protecting data center and branch networks from unwanted attack and malicious traffic.
• Pairing CNI with Equinix Fabric decreases jitter and drives throughput improvements, further hardening digital infrastructure from attack.
• Redundant connectivity to ensure failover and higher network uptime.

As discussed, enterprises are locating more data at the edge than ever before with applications typically being distributed to support that data. When coupled with legacy IT infrastructures and business processes lacking the end-to-end visibility needed, it’s clear that the flexible, comprehensive environment offered by the Cloudflare and Equinix collaboration delivers the capabilities needed to securely integrate traditional enterprise IT and hybrid, multicloud interconnection into a seamless framework.

For more about Equinix Fabric, download the Equinix Fabric Data Sheet.

To connect to Cloudflare via Equinix Fabric, follow these instructions.

If you’d like to explore interconnection options between Cloudflare and Equinix, reach out to Cloudflare using the revamped Cloudflare Network Interconnect contact form and connect to them via the Equinix Fabric portal.