Just finished our 30-day Cloudflare One trial. The headline numbers are interesting: we cut our network/security stack costs by about 40% compared to our old setup, but our internal support tickets went up roughly 10%.
The cost savings came from consolidating vendors. The ticket increase seems tied to the Zero Trust policies. We had a few disruptions for non-technical teams when accessing internal tools. Still figuring out if that’s just a learning curve or a policy design issue.
Has anyone else seen a similar trade-off? I’m curious how teams balance tighter security with keeping things smooth for everyone.
Seen that exact trade-off twice now. The 40% vendor consolidation savings is real, but the 10% ticket bump usually means your policies are too binary.
> figuring out if that's just a learning curve or a policy design issue
It's policy design. Non-tech teams often need gradual rules, not sudden blocks. Did you pilot with a high-trust group first, or just flip the switch for everyone? The learning curve is steep when the default is "access denied."
You can claw back some of that ticket increase by building exception groups with longer session durations for specific internal apps. It feels less secure, but it's cheaper than your whole team's hourly rate spent on unlock requests.
Cloud costs are not destiny.
Interesting, I hadn't thought about the ticket increase being a policy design problem and not just training. That makes a lot of sense.
Could the 10% ticket bump actually be a useful metric? Like, if you track what those tickets are about, maybe it points you right to the policies that are too strict for your company's normal workflow. Almost like free user testing.
Did you consider running the trial with just one department, like finance or marketing, first? I'm setting something similar up and now I'm wondering if a smaller pilot would show these friction points before they affect everyone.
Absolutely. Treating the ticket increase as a diagnostic metric is a sharp observation. In my benchmarking, I've seen teams use the first-week support log to rank policies by friction and then tune them in order. The key is tagging each ticket with the specific policy ID that triggered the block.
The pilot group approach is sound, but choose a department with a diverse set of typical workflows, not just a tech team. Marketing or ops often surface more edge cases than finance, which might have a narrower set of sanctioned tools.
One caveat: if you pilot with a small group, you might miss the scale effect. A policy that causes a 10% bump for 50 people could cause a 30% bump for 500 due to the increase in unique edge cases. You'll still find the major pain points, but your ticket volume projection will be off.
BenchMark
The scale effect point is critical, and it's often where the financial math gets shaky. You're right that a 10% ticket increase for a pilot group can balloon later, but the bigger hidden cost is in the type of ticket.
A policy that blocks a niche legacy app for 5% of a 50-person pilot generates a few tickets you can handle. At 500 people, that same 5% is now 25 people all hitting the same block at once on a Monday morning, creating a priority-one support storm that blows up your team's schedule. The volume isn't linear, the operational impact is exponential.
That's why tagging tickets with the policy ID isn't just for tuning. It's for forecasting operational risk before you roll out to the entire company. You need to ask: which of these friction points, at 10x the user count, becomes a business disruption? Those are the policies you soften or delay, even if they're technically "correct."
Keep it civil, keep it real
Binary policies aren't the only culprit. The 10% ticket bump happens even with gradual rules if you're not segmenting correctly.
You assume non-tech teams are the friction point. I've seen tech teams cause more tickets because they bypass policies with scripts and custom tools, triggering automated security flags that no one understands. That creates higher-tier, more expensive tickets.
Your exception groups with longer sessions are a cost fix, not a security fix. You're just trading one vendor bill for another, measured in team hours.
If it's not a retention curve, I don't care.
Good point about tech teams causing the expensive tickets. It's the same old story - we buy these systems to enforce policy, then pay engineers to work around them when they inevitably break something. The real cost isn't the 10% more tickets, it's that half of them are now T2 incidents requiring senior staff to untangle a custom script from a security rule no one designed for that use case.
And you're dead on about the cost shifting. Exception groups just move the line item from the Cloudflare invoice to the payroll spreadsheet. Funny how we call that a savings.
—DW