Cloudflare VP DACH Stefan Henke explains how the company wants to secure AI use, offer sovereign options and expand its channel network.
Attacks are increasing, AI is accelerating them, and companies are adopting AI faster than they can govern it. Against this backdrop, Cloudflare used it-sa 2026 in Nuremberg/Germany to position itself as a platform for Zero Trust, controlled AI use and regionally anchored data handling. In an interview at the booth, Stefan Henke, VP DACH, explained the strategy and the role the channel is meant to play.
Security is becoming ever more dominant, Henke said. According to his figures, the number of attacks rose by 63 percent between 2025 and 2026. Attackers use AI much as companies do, and the time between the disclosure of a vulnerability and the first attack has shrunk to 22 minutes. After a recent PHP incident, millions of attacks were recorded on the first day alone, he reported, which is why a web application firewall is now a necessity. Zero Trust is needed by everyone today. As reasons for the move away from classic VPN and firewall architectures, he named AI as a driver, the latency disadvantage of VPNs and the granular access rules Zero Trust allows, mapped to a customer’s organizational structure.
The central question for many organizations is how to secure AI internally. Cloudflare answers it with identity, access, visibility and control, according to Henke; its Cloudflare One platform now includes AI security. At Cloudflare itself, 100 percent of employees use AI, including in sales and marketing, but only with proper access rights, since different models need oversight. At its Connect customer event, which drew around 5,500 participants, the company presented Cloudflare OS. According to a press release of 19 October 2026, the AI workspace lets employees describe an automation they need; the platform then builds it, manages its deployment and connects it to systems of record without granting more data access than necessary. It runs on Cloudflare’s infrastructure rather than on employee laptops, which the company says gives security teams more visibility and control. The AI Gateway is meant to match each task with the right model and curb token costs.
CEO Matthew Prince said the company built Cloudflare OS for its own teams first and saw how much faster and more safely they could work. The goal, according to him, is a secure, company-aware AI workspace from day one, without turning every rollout into a multi-million-dollar engineering project.
Cloudflare announced integrations with applications such as Asana, Box, Canva, ClickHouse, GitHub, Gong and Notion, plus deployment partners including EPAM, Happy Cog and Towards AI. Henke added that SAP and Jira are to be offered as well. The aim is full control over data flows, costs and tokens. He urged customers to take AI security seriously and to combat shadow AI; the AI Gateway, he said, shows which AI services are actually in use.
Cloudflare backs this positioning with usage figures. A press release of 20 October 2026 states that more than 10 million developers now build on the platform, up from 7.4 million in the previous quarter. Daily requests from AI agents grew by more than 1,700 percent within a year, and more than half of internet traffic was not human, according to the company. The network spans more than 340 cities in over 130 countries, connects with 13,888 networks and offers 590 Tbps of external capacity. Henke concluded that nobody sees as much traffic. He added that customer Lovable runs entirely on the platform and that all services are already post-quantum ready.
On sovereignty, Henke stressed that the regional team was built locally, not just on paper. With the Data Localization Suite, customers can inspect their traffic and restrict processing to the EU or Germany; traffic can be handled in five German data centers. Together with secunet, Cloudflare offers a sovereign cloud and already serves many government customers. For the past two and a half months, the company has focused on critical infrastructure (KRITIS). A one-to-one comparison with other vendors is not possible, Henke said; the differentiator is an end-to-end platform spanning Zero Trust, the customer network and applications.
In DACH, Cloudflare describes itself as partner-first. Many partners have been won recently, including T-Systems, which speeds up access to regulated customers, authorities and KRITIS operators. Infinigate and Westcon are new distributors; SVA and Bechtle are among the integrators. Hundreds of MSSPs and smaller partners scale via distribution, while large ones such as Accenture handle big bank projects and mainframe migrations to the cloud. The partner program is meant to appeal to MSSPs and mid-sized businesses alike, and all partners are being enabled for AI, since Cloudflare OS must be configured. The Immerse partner events take place in Munich and Berlin; on 17 November 2026, Zurich follows with around 200 participants.
Henke was the first Cloudflare employee in the region; the company now has more than 150 staff in DACH, with an office in Munich.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de