The Total Economic Impact™ of Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud
Presented by: Martin Sanchez
Originally aired on December 10 @ 11:00 AM - 11:30 AM EST
Cloudflare recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct an independent cost-benefit analysis of Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud — our unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environment. Forrester found that, over three years, a composite organization representative of interviewed customers achieved benefits like:
238% ROI, with payback in less than six months
A 29% improvement in security team efficiency, due to stronger protection, consolidated services, faster incident response, and centralized visibility
A 13% improvement in IT team efficiency, due to simplification, automation, or elimination of manual IT tasks.
Reduced risk of breach by up to 25%, due to Cloudflare identifying and better protecting many attack surfaces.
For an enterprise of just 2000 employees, these and other benefits add up to a net present value (NPV) of $5.9 million.
Read the study to learn more about how Cloudflare can benefit your organization’s bottom line.
The Total Economic Impact™ of Cloudflare’s Connectivity Cloud, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Cloudflare, September 2024.
English
Transcript (Beta)
Hey everyone, I'm Martin Sanchez, a member of Cloudflare's product marketing team, and I'm really excited to be here today and to tell you about the results of a total economic impact report that we commissioned from Forrester that's just been released.
What is a total economic impact report? Well, it is a industry standard framework for calculating the ROI of enterprise technology investments like Cloudflare.
It's conducted by Forrester Consulting, The way it works is that they get a lot of real data from current Cloudflare customers about how they are getting benefit from our services.
For our report, they talked to a variety of customers spanning industries, levels of digital maturity, and regions.
On the latter point, the report covers companies from the Americas, from Europe, and the Asia-Pacific regions.
Based on this data, Forrester creates a single hypothetical composite organization and calculates the return on investment that that composite organization gets from using Cloudflare.
And they do this in order to get a fuller and more representative picture of the benefits of using services across Cloudflare's connectivity cloud.
So I just said connectivity cloud. Well, what is that?
If you're not familiar with the term, the connectivity cloud is Cloudflare's unified platform of cloud -native security, connectivity, and development services that provide secure any-to-any connectivity across your entire IT environment.
And what that allows you to do, it allows you to connect users, applications, clouds, and infrastructure globally with really incredible performance and resilience.
It allows you to protect everything, everywhere, with the same performance and same policies and same services really easily.
And it even allows you to build new digital services and customer experiences while taking advantage of all of the incredible global any-to-any connectivity and unified security everywhere on earth, everywhere your employees are, everywhere your customers are.
And so what we did with this report is we were trying to show what is the overall long-term benefit that organizations get from investing very broadly and deeply in all of the different security and connectivity services that are on our connectivity cloud.
And so what were some of the report's findings? Well, let's get into it.
So the top level one is they found that for that composite organization, which for the purposes of this report was about $1 to $2 billion in revenue and over 2,000 employees, so definitely on the larger side of company, that they got a 238% ROI over three years from using Cloudflare.
So what that means is for every thousand dollars that organization invested in Cloudflare, they got an additional $2,380 of benefit after breaking even.
So really excited to see the incredible results that these people are getting from using Cloudflare.
That ROI is based on a hard number in terms of benefits.
And so what they found is that the net present value of that investment in Cloudflare is over $6 million.
So again, that's once they've already broken even from their investment, an additional $6 million on top of that initial investment for that enterprise.
And furthermore, that ROI, that benefit comes with a break-even point of less than six months.
So right away, Cloudflare starts delivering value and is able to deliver a ton over the course of a three-year investment.
So what does this mean? Because this doesn't necessarily mean much on its own.
And so let's put it into context.
What we hear from a lot of the customers we talk to is that their organizations are burdened with a lot of complex tangles of services and infrastructure, whether because of migrating to the cloud or just having a lot of different domains across their IT environment that they need to secure and accelerate.
They find themselves with a lot of these individual point solutions that are really hard to use in an efficient way.
And that leads to productivity issues, that leads to security gaps, that leads to these kind of overlapping pieces of infrastructure that are just unnecessary burdens on the company's balance sheet.
And so what Cloudflare allows people to do is to start adopting their connectivity cloud and really take back a lot of control with services that are programmable and interconnected by default.
And they're also backed by really incredible threat and network intelligence, and they're all available from a single UI.
So what we hear from our customers, and we're really excited to hear this, is that when they start using our services, a lot of that complexity, inefficiency, overlapping, and gap-creating services that we hear about get replaced with this really unified platform that is our connectivity cloud.
And what that means is that these technical teams, security teams, engineering teams, IT teams are able to start wasting a lot less time and driving a lot more strategic value with various types of digital products.
And when they're able to waste less time, then all of a sudden they can reduce risk more, they can improve customer experiences more, they can get rid of old infrastructure that's holding them back.
All of these returns, all of these outcomes rather, are different types of things that boost the bottom line, either by cutting costs or increasing revenue.
That's the sort of findings, or that's the sort of story that we hear about a lot from our customers.
And this is exactly the same sort of story that the ROI findings in this TEI report are starting to show.
And just to give you an idea of this, one of the customers who was interviewed for this report said, Cloudflare is our front door.
It's what customers see and experience when they interact with us.
It powers almost everything we do, providing all the security services that we depend on, and a whole bunch of infrastructure services as well.
So you can see from that example that, you know, when you use Cloudflare's Connectivity Cloud, it really provides a lot of efficiency, visibility across your entire IT environment that leads to a lot of productivity for technical teams, which that in turn leads to better security, better customer experiences, a more manageable, visible network, and then all of which boosts the bottom line and results in that sort of 238% ROI that I was just talking about.
So, of course, the report doesn't just talk about one number. It provides a lot of specific findings.
And again, we are really glad to see that the report touches on specific findings that all lead up to that sort of number that I'm talking about.
So I won't talk about all of them here, but I will cover a few.
And one that we're really excited to see is that the organizations and specifically the composite organization in that report over the course of those three years saw a 29% improvement in security team productivity.
So that means that everything that those security teams are doing, whether it's updating policies, adding new services, adding new users, and updating their permissions, they were able to do much, much more efficiently, spending a lot less time on them.
So some of that efficiency, just to cover some of the examples I said, is driven by just easier to use tools that are available from a single dashboard.
Those security analysts and the overall team doesn't have to be jumping around as a lot in order to update policies, find information.
It also allows them to spend a lot less time responding to attacks and security incidents that come up.
So like I said, all of that is driving that 29% improvement in efficiency and productivity.
Similarly, we saw that in the report, the overall IT team's efficiency also saw a 13% improvement.
So it's happening for some of the same reasons, the fact that Cloudflare services are available from the same UI, that they are integrated by default and don't require a lot of plugging and unplugging on the backend in order to use together.
And so that allows the IT team to do things like automating or just outright eliminating a lot of manual effort.
It also allows them to spend a lot less time manually doing things like managing load balancing or SSL, TSL certificates, managing complex on-premises infrastructure, onboarding and offboarding users, stuff like that.
So again, the real ease of use, the integration of Cloudflare services drives a lot of efficiency and productivity on the IT team, which similarly for that organization in the report resulted in a $1 million benefit over those three years.
Another couple of ones I want to talk about are more on the security side, because like I said, when you have IT and security teams that can work much more efficiently, much more productively, that means that they're able to spend a lot more time making the organization more secure.
So one thing they found is that the organization that was using Cloudflare for its web application security ended up reducing the breach risk for those web applications by 25%, which added up for that composite organization in the report to a $620,000 benefit over those three years.
So where's that coming from?
Well, you can imagine that if a team is able to respond to attacks faster, if they're able to update policies and get visibility into risks more easily, then right away that's going to reduce a breach risk.
So in addition to that, they're just able to reach more of the organization to protect more elements of the web application attack surface, all of which leads to that reduction in breach risk.
And then the final specific stat I'll talk about is that in addition to just reducing the risk of hypothetical breaches, that the organization that was in this report was also able to consolidate and reduce a lot of legacy spend on infrastructure.
So in addition to the security side of things, really speaking to that kind of agility and efficiency of the underlying network infrastructure.
So the composite organization in the report was able to retire multiple solutions and replace them with Cloudflare or just retire them outright, including their CDN, their WAF, their DDoS protection, their VPN, their email security service.
And then just being able to reduce and consolidate all of these isolated point solutions for this organization resulted in a savings of $1.1 million over three years.
So just to kind of tie all these findings back to the story, like I was saying, we hear that organizations are burdened with a lot of complexity in their digital environment.
Services don't work well together, they overlap a lot, there's visibility gaps.
In order to update policies or add new users, you need to jump back and forth between a bunch of different overlapping point services.
Well, when you start consolidating a bunch of these different services on Cloudflare's connectivity cloud, the fact that all of these services work together in a really efficient, composable way, that you can easily customize them to apply to any use case, that they're all backed by the same body of threat intelligence drawn from our global network, and they're all available from truly a single UI.
Well, right away, that leads to the sort of efficiency gains that I was just talking about, that 29% boost in security team productivity, that 13% boost in IT team productivity.
That leads to a better risk posture, as you can see in that 25% drop in the breach risk for the web application.
It also just makes the overall organization a lot more agile in terms of its tech stack, as exemplified by that $1.1 million savings in legacy infrastructure.
Those are all the sorts of things that ultimately boost the bottom line and lead to that 230% ROI over three years.
Thanks so much for listening. You can see here that there is a QR code that you can follow to download the report.
So go there, check it out, learn more about the findings, reach out to the Cloudflare team if you have more thoughts.
Thanks so much for listening.