CIO Influence Interview with Mike Hamilton, Chief Information Officer, Cloudflare

Mike Hamilton, Chief Information Officer, Connectivity Cloud co Cloudflare, shares about the integration of AI and machine learning at Cloudflare for smarter cybersecurity, the introduction of innovative tools like anti-AI bot features,  streamlining security to address the cybersecurity skills gap and more in the following Q&A:

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Hello Mike, tell us about your role and how your industry learnings over the years help contribute to Cloudflare’s mission to enhance global digital security.

I’m honored to be here at Cloudflare at this significant moment in our evolution. I’m here to help drive Cloudflare’s ability to grow and scale as we continue to develop our technology to have a positive impact on the world by providing flexible, scalable, secure, and innovative solutions, helping to make the Internet a better place. 

It’s been amazing to watch the evolution of the Internet over the course of my career and see how businesses have embraced the technology to better serve their needs. We’ve gone from a period where we looked at the world “inside our company network” and “outside coming from the Internet”. We protected what was on the “inside” and managed what we could coming from “outside”. People worked from a computer on a desk at the office and played from a computer on their desk at home. Today the world is much more complex. Customers and employees engage with businesses from wherever they are on whatever device they have. This flexibility can be best harnessed with technology that works at the scale of the Internet but with the control and visibility of the private company network. It’s a vast shift from what we were used to 10+ years ago but it also presents us with an opportunity to engage with customers and employees better. 

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This ability to take into account who someone is, what device they are on, where they are coming from, and what they are trying to reach is powerful. Being able to provide responsive and secure access globally is valuable. Having a fabric of security that is integrated across the product line brings simplicity to the powerful capabilities of our platform. Ultimately I believe that is the game changing advantage Cloudflare presents. 

I’m especially excited about how our Workers and Workers AI capabilities give our customers the ability to create custom applications and experiences for their customers and employees that are backed with the scale of our global footprint. Our customers can build serverless applications where the availability zone is Earth. What a powerful tool!

Cloudflare is one of the leading companies offering cybersecurity measures. How has the integration of advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning helped in improving end user security strategies?

While we haven’t always described ourselves as an AI company, Cloudflare has always had AI at the core of what we do. The thinking behind this was that with enough traffic passing through our systems, the company could build a deeper understanding of attack traffic and make predictions on what the next cyber attacks would be. AI for us means smarter, better, and faster cybersecurity–which helps us block 170 million attacks a day for our customers. And now, we apply AI to protect our customers while enabling them to pursue their own AI strategies.

What are the latest innovations from Cloudflare, and what specific challenges do these innovations aim to address?

There’s so much hype around AI right now, and also a lot of fear. To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we just announced a new free, anti AI-bot feature that blocks all AI bots to protect all customers, even free customers, from web scrapers. With major AI players facing content usage accusations, we realized that many AI companies are not being transparent about their web scraping bots. It’s a one-click, “easy button” tool so that anyone can be protected and prevent their content from being used for training data. That’s been really important to us as we build our AI platform, Workers AI, and ensure that your data won’t be used to train models when you build on us, and we wanted to extend that honesty and trust to web pages too.

Addressing the cybersecurity skills gap is crucial. How is Cloudflare tackling this challenge, particularly in training and nurturing talent within the industry?

At Cloudflare, we recognize the challenges cybersecurity professionals face in navigating the delicate balance between securing the present and preparing for the future. Complexity is the enemy of security, which is why we focus on streamlining and consolidating our approach for end users. Because our tools are unified, there is naturally less complexity which means security professionals can focus more on outcomes rather than configuration.

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We’re thinking about how cyber criminals are using AI to create new types of attacks and strengthen their existing methods, and exploring defensive AI to better detect and defend against threats. 

Because Cloudflare is working on such hard problems, we are able to attract stellar talent across the industry. People see our approach to cybersecurity, and our impact on making the Internet better, and want to work here to tackle these challenges. We had over 600K applicants in just the first half of this year, the highest to date, and we’re in the middle of our robust summer internship program in which interns are really building things, talking to customers, and even shipping features and updates. We’re optimistic that the right talent exists out there and there are people driven to figure these problems out. 

Generative AI is becoming increasingly significant. Can you elaborate on Cloudflare’s current projects involving Generative AI and their potential impact on cybersecurity?

Every business, from startup to enterprise, is looking to augment their services with artificial intelligence – Cloudflare’s platform empowers developers to ship a production-ready application quickly, with security, compliance, and speed built in. Last year we introduced Workers AI, giving developers a simple and affordable way to run AI models on Cloudflare’s global network. Our network provides access to GPUs to ensure AI inference can happen close to users for a low-latency end-user experience, and its privacy-first approach to application development helps companies keep their promises to their customers by ensuring data used for inference is not used for training LLMs.

Our new cybersecurity risk management suite, Cloudflare for Unified Risk Posture, evaluates risk exchange indicators powered by threat intel from its global network. With this suite, we have eliminated the manual and tedious process of evaluating for cyber attacks, streamlining a CISO’s ability to control the risk of cyber breaches and lock down potential threats in real time.

Since our platform has this capability, this allows our internal teams to run experiments and focus on ways to deliver value to our internal business using our own technology all within the guardrails of our zero trust strategy. We get the benefit of being a customer of our own products while also establishing a good base of reference to help guide our customers when they need us. At this phase of GenAI it’s most important for companies to experiment and understand where their efforts are best placed. We are continually evaluating our internal work to ensure that we are nurturing promising uses of the technology.

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Active security platforms are gaining prominence. How do you see these platforms evolving in the future, and what role will they play in building resilient IT infrastructures?

Security platforms are likely to become more automated and intelligent, leveraging artificial intelligence technologies to respond to threats in real time. Real-time threat detection will play a crucial role in not only building resilient IT infrastructure, but also maintaining it for the long term. Just as safe and reliable security platforms are evolving, so too are cyber threats. To combat these threats, active security platforms will need to provide automated response mechanisms and manage traffic across a variety of networks as our world becomes more and more digital. 

Machines are naturally better at spotting patterns on large datasets to detect behavioral anomalies. The real potential of AI in this domain is to be able to define an effective context such that the AI takes appropriate actions and no more. Done well this approach can provide an incredibly fast response to an emerging risk. Done wrong this approach can lead to malicious triggering of automated responses. 

I’m especially interested in how AI can be better leveraged across the myriad of service accounts and automations to better establish baseline behavior and measure against that. 

Before we wrap up, what emerging trends or technologies in cybersecurity are you personally excited about or keeping a close watch on?

I’m really happy to see passwordless technologies emerging that add a great deal of security to the authentication process; it’s promising to see this tech emerging in the consumer space. Understandably, enterprise security technology evolves quickly and gives companies a lot of ways to defend businesses. But at the end of the day, every employee is also a citizen of the real world. To make a real difference, we need more ways to build security into the fabric of everyone’s day to day. 

The best security is transparent to the consumer and makes the simplest action the most secure one. Ultimately, I want to see the tech industry make more progress in protecting vulnerable groups within our global civilization, not just Fortune 1000 companies.

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