CloudFlare has just announced a game changing CDN feature called Keyless SSL, that’s going to alter the CDN landscape. Just kidding, it’s not. Matthew Prince (Prince) is a CDN PR machine. For us in the industry, it’s cool because we’re experiencing something new, and Prince is teaching us valuable lessons in CDN PR marketing. At Bizety, we follow everything he says closely, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in this case, the Keyless SSL is the chaff. The bottom line is Keyless SSL is just SSL. Customers expect SSL to work, regardless of what you name it, and if it doesn’t work, there’s a problem.
Keyless SSL is not going to directly increase sales, but the PR will push the brand name CloudFlare to the furthest corners of the earth. Keyless SSL is as exciting as query string caching, rsync, 302 redirects, and sFTP. During conversations with the press, Prince alluded to the fact that Keyless SSL was created for financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase, because Chase didn’t want to hand out their private encryption keys to just anyone. But the last time I checked, Chase was hacked, and part of their systems were compromised. I don’t know if Chase is using CloudFlare, but Chase is not a good example to use. Prince might as well have said “while talking to companies like Chase, Target & Home Depot” 🙂 . The timing for this announcement is a perfect, as it plays into our current post “series” of CDN Product Management. We’ll analyze Keyless SSL in our next post.