Cloudflare’s Area 1 Security Acquisition to Benefit Partners

This week, Cloudflare announced it is acquiring Area 1 Security for $162 million in cash and stock. The two companies will provide a holistic zero trust solution.

Area 1 Security’s cloud-native platform works with any email offering. It stops phishing attacks by preemptively discovering and eliminating them before they can inflict damage in a corporate environment.

To learn more about what this will mean for partners, we spoke with Matt Harrell, Cloudflare’s global head of channels and alliances.

Channel Futures: What will this acquisition mean for Cloudflare’s partners? Will it create new opportunities for them? Can you give some examples?

Matt Harrell: Area 1 is a channel-first company. It launched a reseller program to widen its market reach across all market segments and today has more than 100 channel partners. For our existing partners, which include everyone from Swisscom in EMEA to Mitsui Knowledge Industry in APAC, to worldwide SIs like Accenture, IBM, Rackspace and Wipro, this integration is giving them unique access to a complete zero-trust solution. Currently, no other cloud-native zero trust provider has a fully integrated approach to securing all of an organization’s applications including email, the largest cloud application. Now, our partners will have all of the benefits of Cloudflare’s platform plus a robust email security offering.

CF: How will this beef up Cloudflare’s zero-trust platform?

MH: Email is one of the largest attack vectors on the internet, which makes integrated email security critical to any true zero-trust network. To us, the future of zero trust includes an integrated, one-click approach to securing all of an organization’s applications, including its most ubiquitous cloud application — email. We block an average of 86 billion cyber threats each day, giving us unique threat intelligence data that can allow us to more effectively filter out targeted phishing attacks (spear phishing) and other security threats that legacy email security solutions and API-only email security offerings can miss. Meanwhile, Area 1 has long taken a pre-emptive approach to email security to stop phishing campaigns during the earliest stages of an attack cycle. By combining Area 1’s highly scalable technology and years of experience in email protection with Cloudflare’s global network, we will provide a holistic zero-trust solution that customers can enable through Cloudflare’s global edge in just one click.

CF: Will this acquisition give Cloudflare and its partners a competitive advantage? If so, how?

MH: We were a customer of Area 1’s for years before we acquired them, so we know firsthand how brilliantly their offering works. Together with our global network, we expect we’ll be delivering to our partners the fastest, most reliable email security solution on the market. This is especially important today, as email continues to be the single greatest threat to businesses not to mention where most attacks begin. In January 2021, there were more than 245,000 phishing attacks, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the highest number of reported attacks in a single month.

CF: What will this acquisition mean for Area 1 Security’s partners?

MH: For Area 1’s partners, it means getting the unique opportunity to have a complete zero-trust solution at a time when email attacks are on the rise. This new, comprehensive email security offering is an industry first, giving partners a major competitive advantage in the email protection space.