Cloudflare has achieved a significant milestone in the cybersecurity industry by being named in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE) for the third consecutive year.

The announcement, made on May 23, 2025, highlights Cloudflare’s consistent recognition in an elite group, as it is one of only nine vendors acknowledged in this year’s report.

This recognition serves as a valuable resource for security and network leaders who are evaluating potential long-term partners for their digital transformation journey. According to Cloudflare’s blog post, this achievement demonstrates the company’s ongoing commitment to pushing the boundaries of SSE platform development since launching their Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) service, Cloudflare Access, in 2018.

Rapid Innovation and Customer-Centric Approach

What sets Cloudflare apart is not just its inclusion in the prestigious report but also its remarkable pace of innovation. Since 2018, the company has maintained an impressive cadence of releasing multiple products each year, resulting in hundreds of new features across its platform. This rapid development cycle has been instrumental in building a mature SSE platform in a relatively short time.

The customer base has responded positively to these efforts, with tens of thousands of organizations now using Cloudflare to connect and protect their people, devices, applications, networks, and data. Customers reportedly appreciate the platform for being faster and easier to deploy, while providing a more consistent and reliable user experience on a flexible architecture designed for long-term modernization.

Building on a Foundation of Success

Cloudflare’s 2025 recognition builds upon its previous achievements in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. In 2024, the company was one of only ten vendors recognized in the report, acknowledged for both its ability to execute and the completeness of its vision. This represented the second consecutive year of such recognition.

What makes Cloudflare’s journey particularly noteworthy is that in 2023, it became the only new vendor named in that year’s Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SSE—and did so in record time when measured from the launch of its first product in this space. At that time, Cloudflare made a commitment to accelerate its development even further, a promise that appears to have been fulfilled based on this latest recognition.

Leveraging Network Advantages for Market Expansion

Cloudflare attributes its ability to rapidly bring capabilities to market to the investments made in its global network over the past 14+ years. The company believes its position in the SSE market has been strengthened by leveraging existing advantages such as its robust multi-use global proxy, fast DNS resolver, serverless compute platform, and reliable global traffic routing capabilities.

These technological foundations have apparently enabled Cloudflare to advance further in the SSE market as larger customers have adopted Cloudflare One, the company’s comprehensive zero trust solution. The platform has evolved significantly since the launch of Cloudflare Access approximately seven years ago, with thousands of organizations now trusting Cloudflare to keep their data, devices, and teams both secure and fast.

Future Outlook Remains Ambitious

Despite the significant progress and recognition, Cloudflare maintains that they’re “just getting started.” This forward-looking statement suggests continued innovation and expansion in their security offerings. With the SSE market continuing to evolve rapidly as organizations seek comprehensive security solutions that can adapt to increasingly complex threat landscapes, Cloudflare’s position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant positions them as a key player to watch in the cybersecurity space.

As digital transformation initiatives accelerate across industries, Cloudflare’s consistent recognition by Gartner signals their potential staying power in a highly competitive market where both technical capabilities and strategic vision are essential for long-term success.