Cloudflare Business Dinner: outcomes of the meeting

On 18 March, the Cloudflare Business Dinner took place in Almaty, organized by system integrator Green Light with the support of distributor Marvel Kazakhstan. The experts discussed modern approaches to protecting corporate networks and also presented the possibilities of countering phishing and options for the secure adoption of artificial intelligence technologies.

From network infrastructure to a cloud security platform

Nurbek Zharkynbai, Senior Account Executive at Cloudflare, spoke about the transformation of approaches to network security. Today the global Cloudflare network has more than 335 points of presence in 125 countries, including three nodes in Kazakhstan - in Almaty, Astana and Aktobe. The network's total throughput exceeds 449 Tbps. In October 2025, Cloudflare autonomously mitigated a DDoS attack with a capacity of 31.4 Tbps - a world record.

The key trend is the shift to the network-as-a-service model, where security becomes a built-in part of the network infrastructure.

Why companies are reconsidering the role of VPN

Baisal Sheraliev, Senior Security Engineer at Green Light, devoted his talk to practical scenarios for adopting the SASE architecture and modernizing remote access. Traditional VPN solutions are increasingly ill-suited to the distributed model of work. Instead, companies are more and more often adopting the Zero Trust approach, under which access is granted not to the network as a whole, but to specific applications and resources through ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access).

Email remains the main attack vector

The speakers showed how modern Email Security solutions use artificial intelligence models to analyze incoming messages and detect phishing and attacks of the Business Email Compromise (BEC) class.

Shadow AI: a new risk area for companies

With the spread of generative neural networks, companies are facing a new category of threats - Shadow AI. The scale of the problem: 85% of IT department heads report that employees start using AI tools even before security specialists have assessed them, and 93% of employees admit that they enter data into AI systems without permission.

DNS filtering as a quick way to raise the level of protection

Cloudflare processes more than 7 trillion DNS queries per day - this gives the platform unique telemetry for detecting new threats in real time.

The main conclusion of the meeting is that corporate security is moving ever faster from a set of separate tools to integrated Zero Trust cloud platforms.

Cloudflare provides a broad set of capabilities for protecting corporate IT infrastructure, and system integrator Green Light is an authorized partner of the vendor and since 2013 has been helping businesses in Kazakhstan and Central Asia build information security.