Forrester Consulting Study finds Lacework generated 342% return on investment

Lacework Forrester TEI ReportWith the range of security solutions on the market, how can prospective customers know what products will best suit their business needs while providing financial value? One way is to calculate the return on investment (ROI) that a company offers its current customers. Whether you’re a small business with a limited budget or a large organization needing to add another tool to the arsenal, it’s important to demonstrate value and ROI to get your leadership team to sign off on the purchase of a new tool.

Lacework commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study that examines the ROI businesses may realize by deploying Lacework. Published in early 2022, the study gives readers a framework for evaluating the financial benefits Lacework can help them achieve. In all, Forrester found that Lacework helped a composite organization achieve an ROI of 342% over three years.

Using information gained during interviews with seven business leaders who had experience using Lacework, Forrester constructed a TEI framework with an objective of identifying the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect a prospective customer’s investment decision. Forrester combined the interview results into those of a single composite organization, which is a high-growth middle-market company with digital and SaaS technology enablement. The composite organization has revenues of $100 million to $1 billion, more than 1,000 employees, and over 2,000 B2B customers and tens of thousands of B2C customers. It’s also a cloud-enabled business with high cybersecurity risk, and thus has significant personnel managing this risk, including dedicated DevOps and security professionals. In addition to the 342% ROI, Forrester concluded that the composite organization received benefits of $2.31 million over three years versus costs of $522,000, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $1.79 million.

According to the study, organizations struggled with risk management prior to using Lacework. Common challenges included a high volume of unactionable alerts, a lack of unified visibility across their cloud environments, and the inefficiency of juggling numerous legacy tools. Customers needed a solution that could:

  • Provide a unified way of seeing what was running across different services
  • Enable a robust, instant detection capability
  • Evaluate cloud security posture and prepare for compliance audits
  • Develop a cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) to identify security issues from inside
  • Address growing adoption and related security concerns with native cloud applications

After switching to Lacework, customers saw a range of benefits, both quantified and unquantified. For instance, Forrester’s interviewees found an 86% reduction in alerts, which led to increased productivity. For the composite organization additional quantified benefits included:

  • An average spend reduction of $230,000 in cost of licenses for legacy tools
  • Savings of $291,000 by eliminating the need to hire an additional security compliance professional

But the benefits of Lacework went well beyond the numeric. Forrester’s interviewees listed many additional advantages, such as:

  • Compliance readiness to win contracts
  • Integration with complementary or existing tools
  • Comprehensive analysis that provided complete visibility and a unified view
  • The ability to do more with fewer personnel, freeing up time to focus on other tasks like
  • threat hunting and resolving severe security incidents
  • Speed of deployment and time-to-value

To discover all the details of Forrester’s investigations, including customer quotes, download the full TEI report.