Over the course of the last few years, Cloudflare built a global network of data center locations and partnerships to expand its DDoS protection, security tools and website acceleration services. That kind of expertise is hard to beat, so maybe it doesn’t come as a surprise that even a global technology juggernaut like IBM today announced that it has decided to partner with Cloudflare to offer these services to its customers instead of building a similar product itself.
IBM’s new Cloud Internet Services offering, which the company announced today, is powered by Cloudflare and will offer all of that services features for protecting sites and speed them up.
IBM’s CTO for Watson and Cloud Bryson Koehler told me that IBM Cloud users will be able to turn these features on with a single click. “Cloudflare has done a great job of building a set of world-class tool that are easy to use and that have been built against the same standards that we hold our internal teams to,” he said. “In today’s fast changing world of constantly evolving services, we are always making built vs. partner decisions and when you really get into the world of caching and load balancing, […] they have done the work of establishing partnerships.”
In addition to this partnership, IBM also announce two additional new security features today: the IBM Cloud Security Advisor and new features for IBM Cloud App ID. The Cloud Security Advisor gives developers and operational teams more and deeper insights into their security posture. Some of these are basic insights like alerting you to the fact that your web server security certificate is about to expire while other features go deeper and alert ops teams of emerging threats that IBM is seeing in its global network and that might affect your application and its data. The tool is also sophisticated enough to ensure that developers who have to stick to certain regulations for managing data don’t accidentally load data from a PCI or HIPAA compliant service and then write it to one that isn’t compliant.
The Cloud Security Advisor, which is officially still an experimental product, takes all of this data and presents it in a single dashboard.
As for App ID, the idea here is to ensure that users who access a given app or data are indeed authorized to do so. That’s not a new feature, but IBM is now extending this service to containers and the IBM Cloud Container Service as well.
