Short answer
No. Managed and co-managed services are optional. You can buy licensing only, deployment, co-management or a full managed service from FirstNet.
In detail: Is managed service included with Cloudflare?
The four service options:
- Supply: FirstNet supplies Cloudflare Zero Trust licensing for the agreed use case, and your team or partner runs it
- Deploy: FirstNet designs and sets up the platform, then hands it over to your team
- Co-manage: FirstNet and your team share policy tuning, alert review and reporting
- Managed service: FirstNet runs the platform on an ongoing basis within an agreed scope and reporting cadence
Whichever you choose, the split of responsibilities is agreed upfront. Production handover includes documented policy scope, administrative ownership, logging and reporting set-up, support channels and any open tuning items. For managed services, the service catalogue, response expectations and reporting cadence formally begin at handover.
Ongoing work after go-live usually centres on access rules, DLP policies, SaaS findings and browser isolation triggers, so plan who will own that work. Co-management is a middle path if your team wants to stay hands-on but lacks the time to do it alone.