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Summary

The best part of our job is the time we spend talking to Cloudflare customers. We always learn something new and interesting about their IT and security challenges.In recent years, something about those conversations has changed. More and more, the biggest challenge customers tell us about isn’t something that’s easy to define. And it’s definitely not something you can address with an individual product or feature.Rather, what we’re hearing from IT and security teams is that they are losing control of their digital environment.This loss of control comes in a few flavors. They might express hesitance about adopting a new capability they know they need, because of compatibility concerns. Or maybe they’ll talk about how much time and effort it takes to make relatively simple changes, and how those changes take time away from more impactful work. If we had to sum the feeling up, it would be something like, “No matter how large my team or budget, it’s never enough to fully connect and protect the business.”Does any of this feel familiar? If so, let us tell you that you are far from alone. Reasons for loss of control The rate of change in IT and security is accelerating, bringing with it dreaded complexity. IT and security teams are responsible for a wider variety of technological domains than they were in years past. Recent research from Forrester confirms these shifts: of teams responsible for securing in-office, remote, and hybrid workers, 52% only took that on in the past five years. Meanwhile, 46% gained responsibility for managing and securing public cloud applications in that time, and 53% were handed the thorny issue of regulatory compliance.IT and security teams have been handed a monumental challenge: connect remote teams, on-premises teams and infrastructure, multiple cloud environments, SaaS apps, and more, so they function like a single, secure environment. But doing so is difficult for multiple reasons:In most businesses, proprietary infrastructure, unique c...