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When cloud first emerged as a new operational model for IT, its low total cost of ownership (TCO) was a topline selling point. Yet today, when considering moving security into the cloud, many worry that it will drive up costs, or at the very least demand an upfront investment that will be hard to justify in the mid-term.
The reality is that cloud-native Security Service Edge (SSE) capabilities deliver a strong return of investment (ROI) with a low TCO. Being able to rationalise this makes it easier to secure budget for a security transformation project. So here are six ways in which the economic case stacks up in favour of cloud security:
1. Reduced costs through the use of shared cloud infrastructure and payment for only what is needed. Scalability on demand, without the need to re-architect
This is your classic cloud economic model. You aren’t having to fund any over-capacity or place bets on organisational growth or retraction. You need not be phased by hard-to-predict M&A or retrenchments, and you can flex to changing working models such as remote or hybrid without trying to engineer working policies to extract value out of historic purchasing decisions. When your security is in the cloud you can add and re-route your workforce without worrying about agility and the value from existing infrastructure.
2. Speed to deployment and the avoidance of physical supply issues and costs
We have all become familiar with disruption in the past two years, but many IT and security teams can vividly remember what it was like in the first half of 2020. Teams needed to make swift changes to infrastructures to support a complete relocation of employees, and at the point they were needed, hardware suppliers—grappling with the same disruption—were struggling to manufacture and dispatch the necessary appliances. We have largely picked ourselves up from the initial impact of the pandemic, but new threats now loom over global manufacturing and supply chains, guaranteeing instability and high prices. Cloud security deploys at the touch of a button and has no requirement and reliance on expensive shipping and customs delays.
3. Reduction in bandwidth and other networking costs
The act of routing traffic back to the data centre for security policies to be applied became highly illogical as soon as the workforce became dispersed and the bulk of the traffic became destined for cloud apps rather than data centre apps. If your users are remote or are sitting in a branch office and working with productivity apps such as Microsoft 365, the traffic flow to and from the data centre now has only one purpose, applying security controls, and probably painfully impacts user experience and productivity. Many organisations have traditionally invested in expensive MPLS lines to connect their offices, however, this is a cost that is dramatically reduced when traffic is steered direct-to-net via a Security Service Edge.
In fact, an ESG report recently concluded that Netskope’s cloud security delivered a 51% reduction in costs for appliances, bandwidth, and staffing… which leads us to point four…
4. Reduction in day-to-day management man-hours, enabling time to be re-deployed on strategic projects to drive topline growth
If you are operating appliance-based web gateways, alongside appliance-based firewalls, and appliance-based VPNs, you are investing significantly more man-hours into the management of network rules and security policies (as well as hardware upgrades and software upgrades and a monthly patch cycle) than you need to be. An integrated SSE cloud security approach means that not only does your team not need to spend evenings and we