Every organization depends on connectivity.  

It’s what keeps users, apps, and data working together. But over the years, as teams added more tools to keep up with remote work, security needs, and cloud adoption, that “connectivity stack” quietly turned into something complicated and expensive. 

Most companies don’t realize how much time, money, and effort are tied up in keeping everything running. VPNs, SD-WAN, proxies, firewalls, and ZTNA gateways were each designed to solve a specific problem. The issue is that now they all overlap, creating more moving parts than most teams can easily manage. 

So, what is your connectivity stack really costing you? Let’s break it down. 

The Hidden Price of Complexity 

No one set out to build a complex connectivity environment. It happened piece by piece. First came the VPN to support remote work. Then, SD-WAN for branch offices. After that, proxies and cloud security gateways for filtering and control. Each addition made sense at the time, but together they’ve created a patchwork that’s hard to maintain and even harder to troubleshoot. 

Every product comes with its own dashboard, policies, and update cycles. IT teams spend hours trying to keep these tools aligned and working together. When something breaks, it can take just as long to figure out which system caused the issue as it does to fix it. 

The result is wasted time, unnecessary frustration, and numerous hidden costs. Complexity not only slows down your users but also your entire business. 

The User Experience Tax 

Most users don’t know what a connectivity stack is, but they definitely feel it. VPNs slow them down. Proxies reroute their traffic halfway across the country. Cloud-based inspection tools introduce delays that result in lost time every single day. 

When work feels sluggish, users start looking for shortcuts. They disconnect from VPNs, skip specific security steps, or find ways around the tools that get in their way. Suddenly, the systems you deployed for security end up creating new risks. 

The truth is that the best security is the kind users don’t even notice. When the experience is seamless, people stay connected, policies stay enforced, and security just happens in the background. 

The Vendor Sprawl Problem 

Take a moment to think about how many different companies make up your connectivity ecosystem. It’s probably more than you think. VPN providers, SD-WAN vendors, proxy suppliers, firewalls, and SSE or ZTNA products, each with its own contract, billing cycle, and renewal process. 

This vendor sprawl eats up both budget and bandwidth. Your IT and security teams are stuck managing separate systems that don’t always talk to each other. Data gets siloed, visibility drops, and you lose that single picture of what’s really happening across your environment. 

Finance feels it in the form of extra invoices. Security feels it in the time spent managing overlap. And users feel it every time their connection lags or drops. Everyone pays for the complexity, just in different ways. 

The Two-Stack Problem 

Most organizations are now running two big stacks side by side.  

One for connectivity and one for security. 

The connectivity stack includes the VPN, SD-WAN, and network routing tools that make sure users can reach what they need. The security stack adds elements like proxies, SSE platforms, and ZTNA gateways to ensure those connections are trusted and safe. 

The problem is that these two worlds rarely operate in sync. Networking teams think in terms of routes and bandwidth, while security teams think in terms of policies and identity. Each stack depends on the other, but changes in one often cause breakages in the other. 

That’s the Two-Stack Problem. 

Maintaining two separate systems to accomplish one goal: giving users fast, secure access. It’s a recipe for duplication, finger-pointing, and wasted effort. 

Counting the Real Costs 

If you only look at license fees, your connectivity stack might not seem too bad. But the real costs hide elsewhere. 

• Operational time: Hours spent configuring, monitoring, and troubleshooting 

• Performance impact: Productivity is lost due to latency, downtime, or dropped connections.   

• Overlap: Paying twice for features like encryption, authentication, and policy control. 

• Vendor overhead: Contract renewals, procurement, and compliance reviews for each product. 

• Infrastructure costs: Cloud egress fees or virtual machine expenses to route traffic through inspection points. 

When you add it all up, that “standard” connectivity stack starts to look like one of your biggest ongoing expenses. The money you’re spending to keep multiple systems alive could often fund something far simpler and more effective. 

The Simpler Path Forward 

Forward-thinking organizations are starting to ask a new question: What if connectivity and security could live in one place? 

Instead of routing traffic through a maze of gateways and data centers, what if access and protection happened in the browser where users work? 

That’s the idea behind browser-native security.  

By building Zero Trust access and threat protection directly into the browser, you eliminate the need for VPNs, proxies, and complex network setups. Users connect straight to the applications they need. Security is applied automatically within the session. And IT teams manage everything from a single platform. 

The result is faster performance, simpler management, and fewer things that can go wrong. 

The Conceal Approach: One Platform, One Stack 

At Conceal, we designed our Browser-Native SSE platform to solve this exact problem. We believe connectivity and security should be the same, not two competing stacks. 

Conceal delivers Zero Trust access and in-browser security through a lightweight extension that’s easy to deploy and works with any browser. There’s no proxy to maintain, no VPN to manage, and no dependency on a distant data center. 

Users connect directly to the apps they need, whether they’re in the cloud or on-premises. Security teams get real-time visibility and control from inside the browser, where threats actually appear. And organizations cut down on costs, complexity, and latency while strengthening their overall security posture. 

If your connectivity stack feels more like an anchor than an advantage, it’s time to take a closer look at what it’s really costing you. There’s a simpler, faster, and more secure way forward. 

Schedule a demo and register for our upcoming webinar to see how Conceal can help you collapse your connectivity stack into one powerful, browser-native platform.