Cloudflare to celebrate its birthday this week rolled out a bevy of new capabilities, including tools for controlling how artificial intelligence (AI) bots are allowed to engage with Web content, that is largely being made available at no additional cost.
As part of an annual celebration of its founding, Cloudflare added additional tools and platforms that give its customers more control over the Web sites and applications that leverage the company’s content delivery network (CDN).
An AI Audit tool, for example, provides organizations with more control over how much content they expose to the bots that are being used to aggregate content that might be used to train a large language model (LLM).
Additionally, Cloudflare is developing a capability that will also make it simpler for content creators to set a price for content that can be used by AI companies for model training and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). That’s become a hot-button issue for many content providers that are seeing their content be incorporated into the output of LLMs in ways that don’t compensate them for the cost of creating that content.
At the same time, Cloudflare is making available Speed Brain, a capability that, based on previous end user behavior, uses machine learning algorithms to predict what specific content might need to be served next. Web sites that make use of SpeedBrain will be able to serve Web pages as much as 45% faster by caching content in a browser before a user clicks on it.
Cloudflare is also adding a public-private key exchange that encrypts messages to ensure only the sender and recipient can view them, in addition to providing an auditing tool, dubbed Plexi, that ensures encryption keys being used are authenticated using an emerging Key Transparency standard.
Finally, Cloudflare, along with free threat research, is making available for free a bevy of cybersecurity tools and technologies that previously required a specific subscription. Those tools span everything from HTTP, Security and DNS analytics, and an ability to detect suspicious login attempts to tools for monitoring logs created by application programming interfaces (APIs), networks, software-as-a-service (SaaS) application security data loss prevention (DLP) and digital experience.
Sam Rhea, vice president and chief of staff for emerging technology and incubation at Cloudflare, said these additions and extensions are all areas that, while providing value, do not rise to providing enough differential value to warrant charging customers extra to access.
In general, Cloudflare is bucking a trend where providers of software and services have increased pricing in response to inflation. Many of those companies are adding additional capabilities to help justify those price hikes, but the overall cost is rising.
It’s not clear what impact this latest Cloudflare move to add additional capabilities at no cost will have on providers of tools and platforms that have similar capabilities, but most IT organizations are continually tying to reduce the number of vendors they need to engage. The challenge is many of the teams that make up an IT organization are not always aware of capabilities that might already be included in a platform that some other part of the IT organization actually manages.
