Cloudflare finds a way through China's network defences

The Register ^

[FarCenter]

Cloudflare has found a way to extend some of its services across the Great Firewall and into mainland China.

"Performance and reliability for traffic flows across the mainland China border have been a consistent challenge for IT teams within multinational organizations," wrote product managers Kyle Krum and Annika Garbers. "Packets crossing the China border often experience reachability, congestion, loss, and latency challenges on their way to an origin server outside of China (and vice versa on the return path)."

Those glitches mean security and IT teams "can also struggle to enforce consistent policies across this traffic, since many aspects of China networking are often treated separately from the rest of an organization's global network because of their unique challenges," the pair wrote.

To address those challenges, Cloudflare has worked with unidentified "local partners" who "route local traffic to its destination within China, and global traffic across a secure link to the closest available Cloudflare datacenter on the other side of the Chinese border."

Cloudflare runs its suite of services in that datacenter, including firewall-as-a-service and Secure Web Gateway. Policies applied to those services can then be extended from an org's presences around the world, through the Great Firewall and into Chinese networks.

This should, in theory, mean an organization's security policies applied elsewhere can be extended into China.

[sauropod]

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