IT and security teams are now responsible for more functions, but the footprint of corporate networks is expanding as employees move to hybrid work and applications move to cloud platforms. Masu.

For example, 52% of IT security professionals weren’t responsible for ensuring the security of both onsite and remote workers five years ago, but they are now.another 46% were responsible Research commissioned by Cloudflare shows that managing and securing data in public cloud platform applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments was not part of the role five years ago. It has become clear that this is a very useful function.

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Practitioner forester consultingThe online survey was conducted among 449 IT decision makers in Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and Latin America.

The study also found that 53% of respondents They were given the task of ensuring regulatory compliance that they did not have to manage five years ago.

IT professionals also find it increasingly difficult to cope with these new tasks, with 30% saying managing and securing data in public cloud platforms and SaaS environments has become more difficult than in 2020. also states that it is much more complex today.

With the increased adoption of SaaS-based applications to support hybrid workplaces, nearly 40% admitted they are losing control of their IT and security environments.

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Approximately 66% cited rapid growth in the overall number of applications as the primary reason for overall loss of control, and 62% cited an increase in application hosting locations. An additional 54% attributed the loss of control to the move from on-premises to the cloud, and 49% cited the move to a hybrid or remote workforce.

Additionally, nearly half of organizations noted that the number and variety of users has increased, extending beyond humans to include machines and third-party systems. The need to manage this business environment while ensuring employee productivity and safety poses challenges.

Approximately 44% of respondents cited difficulty increasing or maintaining team productivity as their top challenge, and 44% cited the need to secure a growing attack surface.

“IT and security teams have been presented with a tremendous challenge,” Jen Taylor, Cloudflare’s senior vice president and chief product officer, said in a post.

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Taylor said both remote and on-premises users need to connect to infrastructure, multiple cloud platforms, and SaaS applications, and most organizations have their own infrastructure, unique compliance requirements, and processes and configurations. and pointed out that it is difficult. Not fully compatible.

“Today, the big clouds have built their business models on capturing data, making it difficult to move it,” said Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. “This captivity in the cloud tempts users into one product and makes it nearly impossible to combine competing products across the cloud space.”

To address these issues, Prince said organizations need a network infrastructure that can easily connect and secure everything, including devices, databases, on-premises hardware, and multiple clouds. Cloudflare is pitching its new “Connected Cloud” service as a “platform of programmable cloud-native services” covering a range of security, performance and developer services.