The Total Economic Impact™ Of Cloudflare - Forrester

##### Key Challenges Before adopting Cloudflare, interviewees’ organizations faced a range of operational and security challenges that hindered performance, increased risk, and created inefficiencies. Legacy environments relied on fragmented point solutions, on-premises hardware, and manual processes that were costly to maintain and slow to adapt. These limitations resulted in frequent downtime, inconsistent security coverage, complex vendor management, and poor user experiences — particularly for remote access and global application delivery. Interviewees noted how their organizations struggled with common challenges, including: - Security gaps and inconsistent protection. Many interviewees said their organizations lacked a unified web application firewall (WAF) or DDoS solution. Some external-facing applications had no protection at all, leaving them vulnerable to attacks and compliance risks. - Frequent downtime and attack disruptions. Interviewees’ organizations experienced outages from DDoS attacks, bot abuse, and credential-stuffing attempts. Interviewees from retail and gaming firms said that downtime during peak events like Black Friday or major sports games caused lost revenue and customer churn. - Complex, fragmented vendor landscape. Multiple point solutions (e.g., Akamai, F5, Infoblox) created operational complexity at the interviewees’ organizations. Their teams had to manage different consoles, policies, and hardware across regions, slowing response times and increasing costs. - On-prem hardware and maintenance burden. Interviewees said DNS and security services often ran on physical appliances, requiring monthly maintenance windows and weekend work. Coordinating global downtime for upgrades was disruptive and unpopular with staff. - Slow time-to-market for new apps. Before Cloudflare, launching new applications at the interviewees’ organizations required provisioning hardware, securing licenses, and scheduling maintenance windows, which often took weeks or months. - VPN performance and user frustration. Legacy VPN solutions were slow, unreliable, and difficult to scale for remote work. Interviewees said their employees faced latency and frequent disconnections, especially during global events like the COVID-19 pandemic.