Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wants you to unplug your hardware firewall — for good. The vendor today unveiled Oahu, a new program that aims to convince enterprises to ditch their legacy firewalls in favor of its cloud-native ones, and it could even win you a trip to the aloha state.

The program’s name is a tongue-in-cheek jab at rival firewall vendor Palo Alto Networks. Over the course of the pandemic, Prince claims many of his friends living in the Palo Alto, California area took the opportunity to move to Oahu, Hawaii. So when it came time to get people to abandon their Palo Alto Networks firewalls, Cloudflare landed on Oahu.

According to Prince, hardware firewalls from the likes of Palo Alto Networks or Fortinet fail to meet the needs of a modern, distributed workforce, while virtual appliances from vendors like Zscaler can’t scale to keep up with customer demand.

Cloudflare claims its take on firewalls improves on these failings by taking a developer-centric approach that’s cloud-native from the get-go. Using the service, CIOs “can apply zero-trust policies to all of their traffic no matter what's going through it, and they can handle encrypted traffic including modern encrypted protocols like TLS 1.3,” he said.

Cloudflare’s firewall is also designed to handle volumetric attacks, something Prince claims its competitors simply can’t contend with. “They just don't have the capacity to be able to stay in front of that,” he said.

The Oahu program itself provides IT teams with support services for importing policies from legacy firewalls into Cloudflare.

And Cloudflare really wants you to ditch hardware firewall. On top of “significant discounts” for anyone willing to make the switch, the company is further incentivizing customers with a chance to win a trip to Oahu. Customers just have to enter a photo of themselves unplugging their old firewall for a chance for some fun in the sun.

“As we're coming out the other side of the pandemic, you're going to see more and more organizations unplugging their boxes, hopefully getting to spend some time in Oahu, and migrating to cloud-based approaches,” Prince said.

Most firewalls are still deployed as hardware appliances today, but organizations are increasingly turning to virtualized appliances and cloud-based firewalls, a recent Gartner report found.

Cloudflare says cloud-based firewalls are better suited to secure corporate networks across branch offices, data centers, the cloud, and beyond, but it’s not the only company making moves in the space.

Palo Alto Networks has made similar claims about its secure access service edge (SASE) platform, which it says extends “comprehensive” zero-trust capabilities across the network. 

The vendor was named a leader in the firewall market by Gartner, along with Fortinet and Check Point Software Technologies. Palo Alto Networks offers both hardware, virtual, containerized, and cloud-based firewalls, and its Prisma Cloud platform adds identity-based segmentation services.