Building Faster and More Resilient Internet with Mike Conlow, Director of Network Strategy at Cloudflare

This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Mike Conlow, Director of Network Strategy at Cloudflare. Mike started his career in political technology and was the deputy CTO for Obama for America, later joining Cloudflare in 2021. Matt and Mike discuss the future of the internet, closing the digital divide, and the work that Mike is doing at Cloudlflare to build a faster, more resilient internet. They also get into why there is a lack of wired broadband competition and network security solutions.

Key Quotes:

“Once you have a very complete edge network globally, all of a sudden running that logic about what is attack traffic and what is not, we can deliver that in a very performant way from our edge network. And we don't need to have a whole bunch of very expensive, very, very fancy on-premise boxes doing that work. We can do it with computing power on our edge.”

“We should make part of the story about 5G and about edge computing just the whole internet is going to get a lot faster to the point where it should feel mostly instantaneous.”

“12 million people in the United States don't have access to adequate internet, meaning that they don't have a wire outside of their house or a wireless way to connect to really good internet.”

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Show Timestamps:

(02:00) How Mike got started in tech 

(04:13) Mike’s current role at Cloudflare 

(05:04) The range of services at Cloudflare 

(07:36) Defining SASE

(08:35) The Cloudflare network 

(16:12) How Mike thinks about edge

(25:00) The future of faster internet

(30:00) The digital divide 

(34:00) Why is there a lack of wired broadband competition?

(39:00) What should we do to improve the internet?

(44:43) Magic Transit and denial of service protection

(47:41) What Mike is excited about in the future

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Sponsor:

Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.

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Links:

Follow Matt on LinkedIn

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn

Connect with Mike on Twitter