Cloudflare Intros Magic WAN

March 23, 2021

Cloudflare introduced their Magic WAN with Magic Firewall and new strategic partnerships with major networking and data center providers as part of Cloudflare One, its cloud-based network-as-a-service solution. Magic WAN with Magic Firewall gives customers of all sizes a one-stop-shop to connect and secure data, devices, offices, cloud networks, and more without relying on hardware boxes. Magic WAN is a SaaS solution that connects any traffic source to Cloudflare’s global network for secure, fast connectivity, and Magic Firewall integrates with it to enforce security rules across all traffic. With Magic WAN and Magic Firewall, businesses can also speed up their network and add security at a fraction of the cost compared to legacy MPLS architecture.

"Companies burn significant resources provisioning and maintaining legacy connectivity technologies like MPLS," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "With Magic WAN, we’re leveraging Cloudflare’s global network to offer reliable, faster, much more cost-effective connectivity with security built in. And by partnering with the leading SD-WAN vendors, we can ensure Magic WAN can be a drop-in replacement for legacy connectivity solutions. The modern enterprise network deserves a modern take on networking, and Magic WAN is just that."

Many businesses still rely on traditional security and connectivity solutions built for in-office corporate networks. Now that the workforce is increasingly distributed, employees are frustrated with the slow speeds of VPNs and security teams are burdened with maintaining an expensive patchwork of solutions. Further, this legacy approach was not designed to support businesses that rely on the Internet for critical workplace apps, which are common attack vectors exploited by hackers. As more businesses rely on the Internet to conduct business, Cloudflare One protects and accelerates the performance of devices, applications, and entire networks to keep workforces secure and connected.

According to Ghassan Abdo, VP of WW Telecom, Virtualization & CDN at IDC Research, “Increased cloud adoption coupled with the recent pivot to remote workers has increased the volume of Internet, SaaS, and IaaS traffic, straining traditional network architectures, such as MPLS. WAN architectures that offer a global scale, integrated enterprise network security functions, and direct, secure connectivity to remote users are key to organizations looking to increase their operational agility and lower total costs of ownership.”

Now, as part of the Cloudflare One suite, Magic WAN securely connects any traffic source — data centers, offices, devices, cloud properties — to Cloudflare’s global network and enables customers to configure public and private routing policies to get traffic where it needs to go, all within one SaaS solution. Magic Firewall allows businesses to define security rules for the network from one central dashboard to help keep employees, offices, and data secure wherever they are.

Cloudflare is arming customers with the ability to:

Connect every office, data center, and cloud property: Magic WAN replaces the patchwork of connectivity and security solutions in offices and remote locations with a single cloud network.

Protect all traffic from one simple user interface: Magic Firewall allows customers to centrally manage security policies across the entire network, all at the edge, all delivered as a service. Magic Firewall gives fine-grained control over what data is allowed in and out of a network.

Secure corporate networks without sacrificing performance: Cloudflare acts as a conceptual hub in a hub-and-spoke architecture, but the hub is our global edge network. This means no more backhauling to centralized appliances and associated performance bottlenecks.

Use any hardware or carrier: Cloudflare is carrier and hardware agnostic. Businesses can use whichever hardware and partners they have today to connect to Cloudflare, and get the benefits of resiliency afforded by our global network.

"Cloudflare has built one of the world’s most interconnected networks," said Enguerrand Gave, Head of Portals & Services at RATP, Paris’s public transit agency. "And to have built-in DDoS protection, traffic acceleration, network firewall, and zero trust functionality, over Cloudflare’s global IP network that can be managed using a single management plane — is arguably the biggest leap in enterprise network technology in the last couple of decades."

“Our network team is excited by Magic WAN. Cloudflare has built a global network-as-a-service platform that will help network teams manage complex edge and multi-cloud environments much more efficiently,” said Sander Petersson, Head of Infrastructure at Flightradar24. “Operating a single global WAN with built-in security and fast routing functionality — regardless of the HQ, data center, branch office, or end user location — is a game-changer in WAN technology.”

Cloudflare Partners

Many organizations already have SD-WAN appliances today to route or tunnel traffic from offices, data centers, or from public clouds using virtual appliances. Cloudflare has partnered with leading network on-ramp providers including VMware and Aruba as well as data center providers including Digital Realty, CoreSite, and EdgeConneX to help businesses move their network to the cloud with existing hardware, wherever they are in their cloud journey.

“VMware SD-WAN virtualizes the WAN to decouple network services from the underlying hardware— providing agility and performance for all enterprises, and is a foundational component of the VMware Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform. VMware and Cloudflare share a vision to provide customers a cost-effective, turn-key and more secure Global WAN,” said Mark Vondemkamp, vice president products, SD-WAN and SASE business, VMware.

“Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is pleased to collaborate with Cloudflare to develop solutions that will enable our customers to easily deploy the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform, acquired with Silver Peak, as the enterprise connectivity onramp to Cloudflare Magic WAN and Magic Firewall,” said Fraser Street, Head of WAN Technical Alliances for Aruba. “This new solution builds on the Aruba EdgeConnect platform’s best-in-class integration with leading cloud connectivity and security services, and will enable customers to utilize Cloudfare’s global network to protect and accelerate cloud workloads.”

“The combination of Cloudflare One and PlatformDIGITAL® opens up new opportunities for our customers to accelerate their digital transformation journey and address data gravity head-on. Our industry manifesto outlined a roadmap to build new native capabilities for embracing multiple interconnection platforms in collaboration with the industry. Today’s announcement with Cloudflare marks a significant step forward towards executing on that vision. Cloudflare’s solutions for addressing issues such as data localization, compliance and security align closely with Digital Realty’s pervasive data center architecture PDx™ approach and will add further value to the rich connected data communities on our global platform,” said Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Realty.

“CoreSite’s collaboration with Cloudflare provides customers with the high-speed direct fiber interconnection and enhanced security they need to meet the strictest performance and compliance requirements supporting modern hybrid applications. We are excited to enable Cloudflare Network Interconnect services within our network-dense, cloud-enabled Los Angeles and Denver data center campuses,” said Maile Kaiser, Senior Vice President, Sales, CoreSite.