Built on Cloudflare: New Harbor is building a future where security just works

The problem with cybersecurity today

Most organizations know they need better security. The problem is that implementing it is complicated, time-consuming, and often requires a dedicated IT team that most smaller organizations don't have.

New Harbor was founded to change that. The company combines AI automation and human security experts to help lean teams strengthen their security without needing to become security experts themselves. Their goal is ambitious: make it significantly easier for any organization to implement and manage strong security across all their users, apps, and devices.

To deliver on that promise, they're building a SaaS platform designed from the ground up to bring enterprise-grade security to organizations that have never had access to it before. And they're building it on Cloudflare.

"Building our development platform with a security-first partner like Cloudflare aligned naturally with our mission to transform cybersecurity into something any team can understand and deploy," says Giuseppe Morgana, co-founder and CTO of New Harbor.

Moving fast enough to matter

Speed is everything for an early-stage startup. The gap between having a good idea and shipping it to customers can determine whether a company succeeds or stalls. For New Harbor, that gap used to be much wider than it needed to be.

When New Harbor moved from a combination of low-code options and traditional cloud architecture to Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare's serverless platform for building and deploying applications, the experience was different from the start.

"When we moved to Workers, the pieces all fit," says Morgana. "The way Cloudflare does things out of the box aligns so well with our own philosophy that we’ve been able to scale alongside the platform."

That alignment isn't just a nice-to-have. It has a measurable impact on how quickly New Harbor can bring new ideas to life. Tasks that used to take hours now take minutes. New engineers don't need weeks of ramp-up time before they can contribute. "When we started developing with Cloudflare, I got up to speed in an hour," says Blake Gilmore, software engineer at New Harbor. “It only takes minutes to prototype new ideas and have them deployed using Cloudflare's infrastructure - right to a preview URL that we can share and test with the team secured behind our default Cloudflare Access controls."

The platform's built-in structure removes guesswork, which matters especially in a small team where every hour counts. "Cloudflare builds tools with the developer in mind so we can move fast without worrying about all of the knobs," says Morgana. "That high level of usability across both the security and developer experience is invaluable."

From idea to production, faster

One of the clearest illustrations of Cloudflare's impact on New Harbor's development pace is their browser-based security diagnostic tool, a feature that checks websites for common vulnerabilities and gives customers actionable results in plain language.

Building something like this typically requires solving a hard problem: security tools are often written in different programming languages, built for the command line, and not designed to run as web services. Integrating them into a modern web application is exactly the kind of project that can introduce huge complexities.

Using Cloudflare Containers, New Harbor found a better path. The team runs security tools in isolated, temporary containers that spin up when needed and disappear the moment they're done. The result is a feature that protects customer data by design, doesn't require maintaining expensive idle infrastructure, and was built and shipped in weeks instead of months.

"Cloudflare Containers opened up a whole new world of open-source projects we can query, integrate, and launch in a matter of weeks," says Morgana.

"We wouldn't have prioritized this project if Cloudflare Containers didn't exist," adds Jonathan Edward, co-founder and CEO of New Harbor.

Security built into the foundation

New Harbor doesn't just use Cloudflare to build faster. They use it to build more securely. For their fully remote team, Cloudflare Access provides secure access to internal tools and engineering environments without the complexity and frustration of a traditional VPN. Access controls are easy to set up, easy to customize, and consistent across the organization from day one.

"Cloudflare Access provides fast, consistent, and safe remote access to our most critical assets," says Morgana. "It is super powerful to customize, but you can also just turn it on and establish a secure baseline."

New Harbor also uses Cloudflare's web application firewall, DNS management, and bot protection to defend against attacks targeting websites and public-facing applications.

The operational foundation that lets a small team punch above its weight

For a startup competing with much larger companies, operational efficiency is a competitive advantage, especially as AI tools change the way work gets done.

Cloudflare has created that efficiency for New Harbor in ways that compound over time. New engineers contribute on day one because the developer platform is straightforward and opinionated in the right ways. Teams spend less time on infrastructure decisions and more time solving problems for customers.

"As we grow, our costs naturally scale, but it is unbelievable what we accomplished with a five-dollar-per-month Workers subscription," adds Morgana. "Moving our architecture over to Cloudflare was a game changer."

What's next

New Harbor is now expanding its platform, growing its team, and reaching more organizations that need better security. As they scale, Cloudflare will remain the foundation they build on.

"Now, whenever we encounter a challenge or an obstacle, we look first to Cloudflare for a solution," says Morgana. "Our team members have even begun using Cloudflare at home in their private projects. That's a really good indication of how strong and versatile the platform is, and speaks to the quality of the developer experience."

For New Harbor, Cloudflare isn't just a tool. It's a critical part of making their vision a reality.