Independent report shows: moving to Cloudflare can cut your carbon footprint

On July 2021, Cloudflare initiated an exploration into reducing the internet's environmental impact, finding that a sustainable Internet is essential. To investigate this, they commissioned Analysys Mason to study the carbon efficiency of network functions provided by them against on-premise solutions. Preliminary findings reveal that Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall (WAF) can reduce carbon emissions by up to 90% compared to on-premise appliances in low-medium traffic demand scenarios. The full report will be available next year, expected to reveal more ways moving to Cloudflare can help reduce your infrastructure’s carbon footprint. This research is a part of the broader plan of addressing the Internet's energy and emissions problem, which contributes around 35% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The study aims to explore efficiency gains in all layers of the network stack as well as the basic architecture of the Internet itself.