Cloduflare will analyze the security needs of companies during its participation in this year’s Congress.

By Carlos Torales, Sales VP for Cloudflare LATAM

When an economic slowdown looms, organizations are often forced to make difficult choices that reduce both risk and costs.

No matter what cuts are made, security must remain stalwart, regardless of economic conditions.

Cloudflare will be presenting its solutions in security issues, as well as the experiences they have had in times of recession during its participation in the 8th America Digital Tech & Business Congress Mexico 2023.

Visit booth E22 on the exhibition floor of the Congress, and attend the lecture that the brand will be giving in the conference program.

Impact of lack of security

Security incidents negatively impact business, cost money to recover from, and can cause lasting damage to infrastructure or public reputation.

Data breaches can have permanent, far-reaching impacts when they result in the loss of intellectual property or the leaking of personal information.

Optimizing the security strategy of an organization by finding efficiencies should not come at the cost of weakening the overall security posture.

Here are three areas worth exploring to find efficiencies in your organization’s security strategy:

1. Do you have too many security tools?

One study found that organizations had, on average, 45 security tools actively deployed.

There is a range of reasons for this large number: for instance, an attempt to build defense-in-depth, the increasing complexity of IT systems, or the goal of closing off as many attack vectors as possible. 

Regardless of the reason, the fact is that more tools do not equal better security. The relationship between the number of tools and security is often inverse.

That same study found that organizations with 50 or more tools regarded themselves as 8% less prepared for an attack.

The reasons for this inverse relationship are myriad. It is difficult for staff to be trained and up-to-date on using so many tools.

The tools may offer duplicate features — accompanied by duplicate blind spots. A plethora of tools means a plethora of vendors to contact when something goes wrong.

Most of all, the preponderance of tools leads to a deluge of alerts that security teams have to deal with, resulting in alert fatigue.

At the end of the day, alert fatigue makes employees more likely to ignore security alerts. 

So, does your organization have too many security tools? Do you have the wrong tools? Where can you safely make cuts?

Get on-the-ground feedback from your security teams. What tools do they use most? What security alerts are most useful? What can they do without?

Removing tools that aren’t used or needed results in cost savings and increased efficiency.

2. Are you still investing in hardware?

While migrating to the cloud demonstrably results in savings over the long term, the cloud migration process can be costly and time-consuming early on.

Ripping out and completely replacing hardware may not be feasible during an economic slowdown or a recession.

But even for businesses that retain mostly on-premise network infrastructure, any new investments in security should be in the cloud.

For distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation, firewalls, load balancing, and network gateways, buying hardware is not a viable short-term or long-term option anymore.

The time has come to move to a more flexible hybrid model instead of continuing to rely on hardware:

• Investing in on-premise hardware exposes organizations to supply chain cost risks.
• On-premise hardware often leads to network traffic bottlenecks since it cannot scale on demand.
• DDoS attacks are getting larger. In recent years, attacks of 2.54, 2.3, and 1.3 Tbps have been reported. Cloud-based security solutions, conversely, can simply scale up to meet these threats.
• The cloud offers more flexible pricing models, enabling organizations to pay for what they use.
• Consolidating in the cloud also offers the bonus of consolidating maintenance costs.

3. Are you paying for point solutions?

Even for companies with largely cloud-based security services, the cost of paying for dozens of individual solutions quickly adds up, to say nothing of the interoperability issues that can arise between all these disparate solutions.

Conversely, consolidating services like application security and Zero Trust in one platform can result in large total cost savings.

Look to work with vendors that bundle needed security point solutions in a broad, cohesive platform.

In addition to saving on cost, this approach helps with mitigating the multiplying effect of having too many tools overall. In addition, such investments ease interoperability concerns.

Surviving economic slowdowns

Times of economic uncertainty often lead organizations to make impulsive decisions about cost-cutting.

Preparing ideas for improving efficiency in advance can help check this impulsivity, ensuring that an organization can come out stronger, not weaker, from an economic slowdown. 

Now is the time to make your security strategy more efficient and more ready for the future by:

• Reducing spending on unneeded security tools
• Investing in the cloud where feasible
• Consolidating tools into a flexible, broad platform

Cloudflare has put together resources to help organizations take control of their spending and turn economic uncertainty into opportunity.

Attend the 8th America Digital Congress Mexico 2023 on June 21 and 22, visit the Cloudflare booth and be sure to participate in the conference. Buy your tickets here