The control problem: why IT and security teams are stretched thin
In conversations with IT and security leaders, a recurring theme has emerged that goes beyond any single product or feature: a growing sense of losing control over their digital environments. This manifests in different ways — hesitation to adopt new tools due to compatibility concerns, or frustration at how much time routine changes consume. The underlying sentiment is often that no matter the team size or budget, it never feels sufficient to fully connect and protect the business.
The challenge stems from an accelerating rate of change. Teams today are responsible for a wider range of domains than ever before. Recent research from Forrester found that 52% of teams responsible for securing in-office, remote, and hybrid workers only took on that duty within the past five years, while 46% gained responsibility for public cloud applications and 53% for regulatory compliance in the same period.
The task is monumental: connect remote and on-premises teams, multiple cloud environments, and SaaS applications so they operate as a single, secure ecosystem. Several factors make this difficult:
- Most organizations run proprietary infrastructure, unique compliance requirements, and semi-compatible processes across their clouds, SaaS apps, and on-prem systems — domains not built to integrate easily.
- Teams are often siloed organizationally, which leads to matching system complexity and fragmentation.
The result is that many teams find themselves bogged down in workarounds and tangled interdependencies.
Introducing the connectivity cloud
What these teams are seeking, often without realizing it exists, is a kind of connective tissue for everything they manage — something that works across their entire environment, is available anywhere, and handles security, networking, and development functions as needed. Survey data suggests this desire is widespread: 72% of IT and security leaders said they would highly value a secure any-to-any cloud platform, and they indicated they would spend an average of 16% of their IT and security budget on it.
The answer we've arrived at is what we call a connectivity cloud. This is a unified, intelligent platform of programmable cloud-native services that provides connectivity between all networks, cloud environments, applications, and users. It delivers a broad set of security, performance, and developer services that consolidate critical functions onto a single platform, rather than requiring replacement of everything in an environment.
A connectivity cloud rests on four fundamental principles.
- Deep integration — it works natively with the Internet and enterprise networks, providing secure and low-latency connectivity between users, applications, and infrastructure without the uncertainty of unmanaged Internet connections.
- Programmability — its architecture supports interoperability with proprietary infrastructure, multiple clouds, and unique compliance needs, allowing for customizable networking and consistent user experiences.
- Platform intelligence — essential security and networking services are built in at a foundational level, and the platform analyzes high volumes and varieties of traffic to continuously update its intelligence models.
- Simplicity — while complete consolidation isn't realistic, the platform significantly reduces tool sprawl by managing much of the IT environment from a single pane of glass.
How organizations are using the connectivity cloud
Secure remote access at scale
For the electronics retailer Conrad Electronic, nearly half of their 2,300 employees need remote access to corporate applications. Previously, that meant deploying and configuring VPN clients for each user, which one team member described as a series of administrative bottlenecks.
Conrad Electronic now uses Cloudflare's connectivity cloud to grant secure access to hundreds of corporate applications. The team reports a significantly lower management burden and more time each month for improving web operations. Security is also stronger: "We can restrict specific individuals or secure sensitive areas with a mouse click. Not having to maintain 1,000 VPN profiles improves our security and saves us time and money."
Consolidating security for customer-facing applications
Multinational retailer Carrefour saw cyberattacks rise alongside its ecommerce growth, but adding more security tools made things worse. As their security team explained, "The interlacing of multiple tools complicated coordination and control of the architecture…additionally, the lack of integration across tools made investigating and resolving security and performance issues a complex and time-consuming effort."
As part of its security transformation, Carrefour adopted Cloudflare's connectivity cloud to prevent web exploits, zero-day threats, and malicious bot traffic. This replaced five security tools from different vendors. Since then, incident resolution time has dropped by 75%.
Powering application development
For the design platform Canva, the draw was programmability and network integration for custom code at the edge. The developer platforms they previously used were too time-consuming and had limitations that held back their work.
Canva now uses Cloudflare's connectivity cloud as "a critical part of our software," building and running custom code, optimizing page delivery for SEO, and setting time limits on content access. The experience led Canva to adopt Cloudflare's secure access and application delivery services as well.
These examples illustrate how the connectivity cloud can address the loss of control that so many teams are feeling. Whether the goal is securing distributed workforces, delivering trusted applications, or building new ones, the platform's integration, programmability, intelligence, and simplicity help restore a sense of command over the digital environment.
