The report by The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reveals that Zscaler's Zero Trust Exchange, a cloud-native solution, can significantly enhance network security, operational efficiency, and business agility. ESG's analysis shows that a company with 5,000 users can realize a $4.1 million annual benefit and a 139% ROI compared to traditional appliance-based network security.

The shift to cloud-based infrastructure presents challenges in maintaining configurations, securing data, and managing identities, with attackers leveraging traditional tactics to target cloud environments. Despite debates on the relevance of network security in a cloud-first world, firewalls remain a crucial component for protecting hybrid cloud environments, with security teams needing a balance between third-party tools' established security and cloud service providers' ease of deployment and management.

The report highlights how finance leaders have an opportunity to develop their role into something that is central to their organisation, helping to identify innovation, efficiency and future strategy. We are also seeing that CFOs need to embrace digital technology to drive efficiency and reduce costs.