EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
WITH A GROWING NEED TO CONNECT EVERYTHING WITHIN THE BUSINESS , HOW CAN ENTERPRISES REGAIN CONTROL OVER THEIR INCREASINGLY COMPLEX AND SPRAWLING TECHNOLOGY AND DATA ?
Matthew Prince , CEO and Co-founder , Cloudflare
Cloudflare – a security , performance and reliability company helping to build a better Internet and a leading connectivity cloud company – has released a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting that underscores companies ’ growing need to connect everything in their business while maintaining control over their security , productivity and competitive growth .
To help the industry address this emerging challenge , Cloudflare is introducing the concept of the connectivity cloud – a unified platform of cloudnative services designed to help enterprises regain control over their increasingly complex and sprawling technology and data .
“ Today , the big clouds have built business models on capturing your data , making it hard to move your data . These captivity clouds will lure you in with one product and make it near impossible to mix and match competitive offerings across the cloud space ,” said Matthew Prince , CEO , Cloudflare . “ Cloudflare offers an alternative : the connectivity cloud . Fundamentally , we are a network that makes it easy for you to connect and protect everything . We sit atop everything else and connect anything that ’ s online – whether it ’ s a cloud , a device , a database , or on-premises hardware – so businesses can escape the grasp of the cloud captors .”
In the last several years , organisations across the globe have seen a dramatic increase in the adoption of more applications , often SaaS-based , to help teams efficiently and collaboratively operate in a hybrid work environment . However , this has introduced new risks and challenges and led nearly 40 % of organisations to agree or strongly agree that they are losing control over their IT and security environments .
IT and security teams are now tasked with responsibilities to remain productive and compliant while managing an increasingly complex landscape – and a third of organisations say these new responsibilities weren ’ t in their purview five years ago . These tasks have also become harder since 2020 , with 30 % of teams noting that managing and securing both public cloud environments and data in SaaS environments is significantly more complex today than ever before .
Security and IT leaders see their major challenges revolving around managing a growing business landscape while ensuring their team remains productive and secure . Nearly 50 % of organisations see the growing number and types of users – spanning human , machine and third party – as one of the top five challenges they face today . The top five challenges also include the difficulty of maintaining or improving their team ’ s productivity ( 44 %) and addressing growing attack surface areas ( 44 %). If not adequately addressed , these challenges are expected to have a direct impact on the customer experience , productivity and the organisation ’ s competitive advantage .
Almost all ( 98 %) of organisations agree that businesses would gain value from a connectivity cloud that provides secure , performant , ‘ any-to-any ’ connectivity ( i . e ., connectivity between more people , apps , data , devices , networks and clouds ) more now than ever before . Nearly half of respondents believe this type of solution would accelerate Digital Transformation while reducing the attack surface area .
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