According to Cloudflare, companies are losing control of their IT and security environments – and the major cloud providers hold all the keys to the lock.

The web performance and security provider partnered with Forrester to publish a study that surveyed nearly 450 IT decision makers worldwide. It found that while companies were seeing a dramatic increase in application adoption – predominantly SaaS-based applications – this also created challenges.

Two in five organizations surveyed (40%) agreed that they are losing control over their IT and security environments, while almost a third (30%) of respondents said that managing and securing public cloud environments and data in SaaS Environments today are “significantly more complex” than ever before.

That’s not the only thing that has changed in recent years. Nearly half of the companies surveyed said one of their top five challenges was the growing number of users they needed to manage and enter. not just a human, but a machine and a third party. IT managers also struggle with maintaining or improving their team’s productivity (44% of respondents) and dealing with growing attack surfaces (44%).

The biggest driver of loss of control was cited by companies as an increase in the number of applications they manage (66% of respondents). Expanding application locations, moving from on-premises to the cloud (54%) and moving to a remote and hybrid workforce (49%) were also popular, according to 62% of respondents.

Who is to blame for these challenging conditions? For Cloudflare, the answer is obvious. “Today, the major clouds have built business models on capturing your data, making it difficult to move your data,” said Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. “These captivity clouds lure you in with a single product and make it nearly impossible to combine competing offerings across the cloud space.”

The company claims to have a solution and is rolling out what it calls it “Connectivity cloud.” It is described as a “unified platform of cloud-native services” designed to help companies take back control of their increasingly complex and voluminous technologies and data.

This basically means four key factors. The first is deep, native integration with the Internet and enterprise networks for infinitely scalable, low-latency connectivity between users, applications and infrastructure. The second is limitless interoperability and customizable networking, while the third is a single pane of glass. The final factor is the ability to analyze extremely high volumes and variations in traffic to provide “platform intelligence,” which can be considered a key strength of Cloudflare.

This appears to be a significant outlay for Cloudflare, which introduced itself in the press release as “the leading connectivity cloud company,” which might be a safe bet considering its category so far.

“Fundamentally, we are a network that makes it easy for you to connect and protect everything,” Prince added. “We sit on top of everything else, connecting everything online – be it a cloud, a device, a database or on-premises hardware – so companies can escape the control of cloud hijackers.”

Photo by Rodolpho Zanardo

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