Beyond the blank slate: how Cloudflare accelerates your Zero Trust journey (opens in new tab)
Cloudflare argues that a Zero Trust platform’s blank-slate flexibility can become an adoption barrier when customers must configure countless policies and security controls themselves. Project Helix addresses this by codifying Cloudflare experts’ best practices into automated Terraform templates, delivered through a simple web interface. The result is a faster, more consistent way to deploy a secure Cloudflare One baseline within minutes rather than hours. ## The complexity barrier of a blank slate - Cloudflare One offers extensive capabilities across DNS protection, network security, Secure Web Gateway, TLS inspection, DLP, antivirus scanning, and Zero Trust Access. - Tenants are generally provisioned with minimal defaults because enabling advanced protections immediately could disrupt existing traffic and applications. - Customers must therefore manually activate numerous settings, policies, and routing changes. - Some features require coordinated configuration: - Enabling private application access by hostname requires both a platform setting and a specific CGNAT range in the client’s split-tunnel configuration. - Traffic from applications such as Zoom may need to bypass Cloudflare and go directly to the Internet. - Captive portal exceptions can be important for users connecting from hotels, airlines, and other public networks. - Initial setup guides and scenario-based wizards helped, but customers using multiple scenarios still had to complete each workflow separately. ## Project Helix: Turning expertise into automation - Cloudflare gathered deployment knowledge from Solutions Engineers, Professional Services Engineers, and partners. - The team documented desired proof-of-concept and production outcomes, including: - Baseline DNS, network, and HTTP security protections - TLS inspection - QUIC and HTTP/3 security - Remote Browser Isolation for risky categories such as newly registered domains - Visibility and controls for AI applications - Tenant Control policies restricting users to approved SaaS instances - Helix packages these recommendations in a repeatable, codified format that can be applied with a button click. - This avoids relying on individually maintained documentation or the memory of experienced administrators. ## Problems with manual deployment - Configuring the complete baseline on a new tenant can take several hours. - Documentation must be continually updated as Cloudflare features and best practices change. - Repetitive manual steps increase the risk of configuration errors and inconsistent deployments. - Manual work also makes it harder for less experienced users to benefit from Cloudflare One’s full capabilities. ## Terraform, Workers, and ephemeral provisioning - Helix uses scalable Terraform templates to define Cloudflare One settings, configuration snippets, and security policies. - A web interface hosted on Cloudflare Workers accepts basic customer inputs and executes the Terraform configuration. - Cloudflare Containers support the provisioning workflow. - The process uses no persistent storage, reducing risks associated with retaining Terraform logs or authentication tokens. - Within minutes, users can deploy an advanced baseline configuration and review additional recommended policies to enable. ## Layered security configuration - Helix begins with DNS security policies that: - Support corporate DNS for Zero Trust - Block malicious or questionable categories before they resolve - It then applies network policies to protect users across ports and protocols. - The broader configuration also incorporates traffic-routing exceptions, application controls, and user-experience improvements such as captive portal handling. Project Helix’s practical recommendation is to replace manual, blank-slate configuration with expert-designed, automated baselines. This lets customers adopt Cloudflare One’s advanced protections quickly while preserving the flexibility to customize policies for their own environments.