Dave Barnett has called on businesses in Africa to seize the opportunity to hook onto Cloudflare’s networks to secure their websites, APIs and other services.
He explained that Cloudflare is a global network designed to make everything one connects to the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable.
Dave Barnett who was speaking in an exclusive interview with newsghana.com.gh on the Sideline of the AfricaCom event held in Cape Town, South Africa from 8th-10th November, 2022, noted that Cloudflare can also be used in Securing websites, APIs and Internet applications as it protects corporate networks, employees and devices.
He averred that digital transformation touches every organization, every digital market from government to digital service providers and that what is happening in Africa is the use of new internet technology, like cloud, new mobile devices.
According to him, the growth of internet connectivity across the region demands the use of Cloudflare and that people across Africa must have a great concept created around all methods.
Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks operating on the Internet. People use Cloudflare services for the purposes of increasing the security and performance of their web sites and services.
In the light of this, he said, Cloudflare is investing heavily in the African continent to enable their services to be available within a very short reach of as many people in Africa as they can.
“So, we operate in over 275 cities in over 100 countries all over the world. What we are trying to do is to provide our services within a blink of an eye of users. The services that we provide make life simpler for our customers, because our mission is to make the internet more secure, faster, more private for anybody who wishes to use our products,” he said.
He said: “If you’re a developer, we allow you to run JavaScript code as well as Rust, C and C++ on our powerful edge network, so that you can get as close to a user as possible. This eliminates delays and improves the experience for users like you.”
Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet.
Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks. Today, businesses, non-profits, bloggers, and anyone with an Internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare.
Touching more on Cloudflare, Dave Barnett mentioned that typically organizations want to make things more secure, and the only option that seems available to them is to buy technologies, but Cloudflare is introduced as a service so they are very close to all citizens, providing internet speed, and reliable performance.
“We can bring a large variety of services to peoples’ needs without needing to procure plain technologies. For example, if you want to protect your website from general service attacks then definitely you would need Cloudflare. You wanted to provide a development environment to create a website and service you can create that development on Cloudflare. Because we believe technology to be consumed as easily as possible and accessible to everyone.”
He indicated that the company is investing heavily in expanding their network across Africa.
According to him, they have created global networks of over 25 and the investments they are making in their network in Africa is massive, explaining that if Ghanaians want to assess their services, they have exactly the right to their system as those in other parts of the world.
Cloudflare’s interest in Africa
Dave Barnett pointed out that Cloudflare has been involved in Africa and has been providing services for a long time.
Their job, he insisted, is to make internet services more private, and more secure, as they establish good working relations with digital service providers in Africa.
“When we place our technology in locations, we do so, so we can provide fast and reliable service to people in that region, so we do actually have a code location in Accra, Gabon, Lagos, Mombasa, Nairobi. What we are trying to do is to provide fast service, we are trying to make the internet of things safer.”
He indicated that Cloudflare is the fastest global network on the planet and they are trying to connect their product to other services like Google, Microsoft etc.
The AfricaCom event was held in Cape Town, South Africa from 8th-10th November, 2022. The meeting brought together Africa’s largest community of tech champions and the largest tech event on the continent.
