Among traditional operation models, cloud has always stood out for its low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). However, a move to cloud security doesn’t come without some investment, and this initial outlay can be a distraction, prompting people to focus on cost rather than savings. .
The reality is that a cloud-native Secure Service Edge (SSE) architecture delivers 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:
- 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 are not 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.
- 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, delays and high prices. Cloud security deploys at the touch of a button, and has no requirement and reliance on expensive shipping and custom delays.
- 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 workforce 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 percent reduction in costs for appliances, bandwidth and staffing…which leads us to point four…
- Reduction in day-to-day management man-hours, enabling time to be re-deployed on strategic projects to drive top-line 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 weekends on upgrades, but you can devise unified security policies that can be applied consistently across your security estate. This results in your team focused on the most important of items, managing alerts and events and tuning your security controls to be most effective.
- Power usage cost reduction There is another cloud-wide benefit, often overlooked, that is a bi-product that is not just focused on the security benefits. With a move to cloud, there will be a reduction of racks of network and security appliances, all running in high-availability clusters, operating in the data centre. There is a significant cost reduction to be made here with the use of shared infrastructure along with passing the power usage costs over to the cloud security provider whilst aligning this to their green environmental agenda to operate their services as efficiently as possible.
- Breach risk reduction The previously mentioned report found that implementing the SSE platform brought an 85 percent decrease in security risk and exposure, which will have a direct cost implication in the form of reduced breach costs and fines. As nations around the world continue to move their legislation and fines in line with the EU’s GDPR (which can hit an organisation for up to four percent of its annual revenue for a breach) these savings can be significant.
You don’t have to look hard to find IT and security leaders who have found savings from moving security into the cloud. Indeed research has found that 79 percent of European organisations had already done so. An upfront investment can be much easier to justify when you consider the costs of inaction.
