What the BastionZero Acquisition means for Cloudflare

Cloudflare Inc announced its acquisition of BastionZero, a Zero Trust infrastructure access platform, on Thursday, May 30. The acquisition was announced on the day of Cloudflare’s North American Partner Summit and follows the acquisitions of Baselime and PartyKit, both of which were acquired in April. BastionZero is a leader in Zero Trust, both in cloud and on-prem environments.

BastionZero was founded in 2019 with the purpose of providing detailed access controls to better manage IT environments. It integrates SSO and MFA for additional protection. Its centralized policy management makes it easy to implement policies via a single web console or API endpoint. Centralized logging provides searchable command logs and session recordings, making tracking changes simple. It designed a Zero Trust access protocol which limits an attacker’s abilities—in the event of an attack, it prevents any commands being executed and limits access.

Cloudflare One is an enterprise network-as-a-service that takes a Zero Trust approach to networking. It was launched in 2020 and is one of the fastest-growing secure access service edge (SASE) platforms. BastionZero can take this approach further. Its technology brings centralization to controls—in on-prem, cloud and hybrid environments—while keeping the environment secure with a Zero Trust framework. Cloudflare intends to integrate BastionZero’s infrastructure access controls directly. This change will increase security with its CCO and MFA sign on policies and real-time, centralized credential and access management controls. It will also increase control of the environment and compliance with its built-in logging and centralized policy controls.

Zero Trust is a security model that promotes constant monitoring, least privilege access, multi-factor authentication and microsegmentation. It focuses on users, assets and resources. Simply put, it promotes Zero Trust. Everything must be verified. With the rise of remote and hybrid working, network security has to account for employees on personal devices working on networks outside of the traditional office.

Cyberattacks aren’t slowing down, and the security shortcomings created by remote work aren’t helping. A Zero Trust framework addresses these shortcomings and creates an environment with fail safes so that when—not if—there is a breach, the damage is limited.

Adapture is a Cloudflare Elite partner and received the 2024 Cloudflare Partner Award for Technical Excellence. We are one of the few providers of Cloudflare managed services in North America. Our close partner relationship with Cloudflare means that we have the resources to smoothly migrate or manage your environment. Our team keeps up with the latest solutions to ensure that your environment is configured according to best practices.