Cloudflare Business Dinner: Highlights of the Event

On March 18, the Cloudflare Business Dinner was held in Almaty, organized by the systems integrator Green Light with the support of the distributor Marvel Kazakhstan. Experts discussed modern approaches to protecting corporate networks and presented strategies for combating phishing as well as options for the secure deployment of artificial intelligence technologies.

From Network Infrastructure to a Cloud-Based Security Platform

Nurbek Zharkynbay, Senior Account Executive at Cloudflare, spoke about the transformation of approaches to network security. Today, Cloudflare’s global 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 bandwidth exceeds 449 Tbit/s. In October 2025, Cloudflare autonomously mitigated a DDoS attack with a peak volume of 31.4 Tbit/s - a world record.

A key trend is the shift toward a network-as-a-service model, in which security becomes an integral part of the network infrastructure.

Why Companies Are Reevaluating the Role of VPNs

Baysal Sheraliev, Senior Security Engineer at Green Light, focused his presentation on practical scenarios for SASE deployment and modernizing remote access. Traditional VPN solutions are becoming increasingly ill-suited for a distributed work model. Instead, companies are increasingly adopting a Zero Trust approach, in which access is granted not to the network as a whole, but to specific applications and resources via ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access).

Email remains the primary vector for attacks

The speakers demonstrated how modern email security solutions use artificial intelligence models to analyze incoming messages and detect phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks.

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 are starting to use AI tools even before they have been evaluated by security teams, and 93% of employees admit to entering data into AI systems without permission.

DNS Filtering as a Quick Way to Boost Security

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

The main takeaway from the meeting is that enterprise security is increasingly shifting from a set of disparate tools to integrated Zero Trust cloud platforms.

Cloudflare offers a wide range of features to protect corporate IT infrastructure, and the systems integrator Green Light is an authorized partner of the vendor and has been helping businesses in Kazakhstan and Central Asia build their information security since 2013.