Cloudflare describes its mission of building a better Internet. While it did not directly start out with the goal of reducing the Internet's environmental impact, that goal has also come into play. Cloudflare recognises a better Internet must also be sustainable and states it continues to look for efficiencies in all it does.

To measure how well it achieves these goals Cloudflare commissioned a study from consulting firm Analysys Mason to evaluate the relative carbon efficiency of network functions like firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, content servers, and others that are provided through Cloudflare against similar on-premise solutions.

The full report will be made available in 2023, but so far the initial findings are that Cloudflare's WAF generates up to around 90% less carbon than on-premises appliances at low to medium traffic levels.

This means your organisation can not only ensure it is secure but can also immediately, and positively reduce your carbon footprint by adopting the Cloudflare WAF. A WAF protects your applications from hackers and buys you time in patching and remediating flaws. One of the largest US data breaches of all time, Equifax, came via an unpatched Adobe Struts installation and would have been prevented by a WAF.

So, a WAF is an essential security tool in your business - and Cloudflare provides a sustainable option.

According to the United Nations, energy generation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for approximately 35% of global emissions. With all the power needed to run servers, routers, switches, data centres, and Internet exchanges around the world, it's not surprising that the Boston Consulting Group found that 2% of all carbon output, about 1 billion metric tons per year, is attributable to the Internet.

To estimate the relative carbon savings of moving enterprise network functions, like those offered by Cloudflare, to the cloud, the Analysys Mason team is evaluating a wide range of enterprise network functions. These include firewalls, WAF, SD-WAN, DDoS protection, and content servers. For each function, they are modelling a variety of scenarios, including usage, different sizes and types of organizations, and different operating conditions. Information relating to the power and capacity of each on-premise appliance is being sourced from public data sheets from relevant vendors. Information on Cloudflare’s energy consumption is being compiled from internal datasets of the total power usage of Cloudflare servers, and the allocation of CPU resources and traffic between different products.

The final report will be released in 2023.