This decision is not only about CDN and WAF renewal. It is about how the Firm enables citizen development with Zero Trust, compliance, and governance built in.
More Firm members can now build useful applications with AI assistants, even without deep engineering support.
Perimeter-based controls, manual approvals, and network-dependent access patterns slow down launch and adoption.
Multiple platforms and inconsistent onboarding paths create uneven protection, governance, and lifecycle management.
The challenge is to let application creation accelerate without allowing risk, inconsistency, and control gaps to accelerate with it.
Standardize CDN, WAF, DNS productization, and Access-led publishing on a single Cloud Network platform to simplify operations and policy enforcement.
Bundle URL creation, protection, authentication, and policy into one guided workflow.
Use the same platform to enforce ownership, policy inheritance, observability, and lifecycle controls.
Expand Cloudflare Access capacity now so platform growth is not constrained by the access layer.
Give builders a secure runway for citizen development and AI-enabled application development.
Apply Zero Trust, auditability, and policy consistency by default.
Create stronger ownership, observability, and retirement discipline across application portfolios.
More self-serve, less ticketing, fewer manual reviews.
Less duplication and stronger platform leverage as consolidation progresses.
Security is embedded from the start rather than added later.
The current state distributes application delivery, security, and access controls across multiple vendors, which increases complexity and makes standardization harder.
Cloudflare appears to align most closely to the target state: secure app publishing, Zero Trust delivery, and platform automation.
Palo Alto remains important in complementary domains such as office, egress, and non-publishing controls.
Akamai remains credible where product-specific needs persist, but appears less aligned to the self-serve Cloud Network platform direction.
Cloudflare is fully embedded in the Tech Ecosystem operating model, with the Zero Trust control plane built and running.
The question is not whether to adopt Cloudflare — it is whether to continue investing in a platform where the foundation already exists.
Cloudflare Zero Trust enabled the move from AWS/self-hosted runners to GitHub-hosted runners, eliminating associated infrastructure costs across the Tech Ecosystem.
Deployer PaaS, built on this Cloudflare Zero Trust foundation, has already onboarded close to 400 applications. Secure, self-serve publishing is a live, production-grade Firm capability today — not a future aspiration.
The business case should not rely only on near-term savings. The stronger case is that consolidation reduces duplicated operating models, improves platform leverage, and supports the Firm's strategy to scale AI-enabled application delivery securely.
Begin RFX process to converge/consolidate our AI-enabled secure network publishing using standardized CDN & WAF platform, to simplify operations and improve commercial terms.