You're sitting in an audit meeting. The auditor is asking about those unplanned firewall changes again.

"Sorry, our security vendor's architecture requires us to violate our own change management policies."

Cue the awkward silence. Everyone knows this is broken, but they're powerless.

This moment reveals something most security teams won't admit: vendors are deliberately designing products that make you fail. Then they blame you for the failure.

The Perfect Trap

Here's how it works. Enterprises struggle just to make basic connections work. Security vendors need connectivity too, but their requirements conflict with network security standards and best practices.

Just to make data flow requires architecture exceptions and security compromises. Which is a terrible look for a security vendor, but that's the current state of affairs.

Most vendors transitioned from on-premise to cloud models. Those vendors often use cloud IPs that change over time due to normal cloud lifecycle. They can't even state the initial IPs.

How do you manage firewall rules like this? You can't. It's reactive and error-prone from the start.

Because the changes happen "without notice," customers have to react with unplanned or emergency changes. These always get flagged in audits.

Vendors are forcing their customers into audit violations by design.

The Devil Is In The Details

These problems don't surface until after the solution is purchased. The security team ironically doesn't have the implementation experience to foresee these challenges.

By the time they discover the issues, they're trapped. They made the choice after all.

The people making purchasing decisions don't have the implementation scars to spot these problems. By the time the people who do the actual work get involved, the contract is signed and the blame is already shifting.

What happens when that security team tries to push back? "This doesn't work in our environment."

The legacy commit-based pricing model trap kicks in. The customer is going to pay whether they use it or not. The vendor gets paid regardless, with no teeth in the contract.

That's the ultimate vendor protection racket.

The Sunk Cost Prison

Legacy vendors sell on hopes and dreams. Customers have so much money tied up that failure can't be admitted until time has passed.

They have to find workarounds and make exceptions because time is money and time is wasting.

Research confirms this trap. Security professionals fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy where "an activity, project, or product is valued at the amount of resources invested even if it is not worth that investment."

Customers become trapped where admitting the vendor's solution is fundamentally broken means admitting they made a massive mistake. So they keep throwing good money after bad, implementing workarounds that make their security worse.

Meanwhile, 99% of cloud security failures get blamed on human error. The perfect scapegoat scenario where vendors can always point to "user error" when their products fail.

Breaking The Cycle

We approached this problem differently. Our business is data, so we have to make this secure and sustainable or we won't have data.

When we tell our customers that data security can't be compromised for convenience, their reaction is telling: violent agreement, kinship, sighs of relief.

Those sighs tell the whole story. Even people working at other vendors know the current approach is broken. They're trapped in companies that prioritize ease of sale over actual security implementation.

What we're doing defines a new category.

We're not just building a better product. We're resetting the entire industry's expectations about what's acceptable.

When other security teams see that enterprise-grade security is possible without the compromises, it gives customers permission to set higher expectations. Be specific.

We hear every day that customers hate talking to their vendors. They're not partners in the outcomes. They're expecting more money without providing more value. The legacy approach diminishes security.

Permission To Demand Better

When a customer armed with this knowledge goes back to their legacy vendor and says "we want no firewall exceptions, no audit violations, no emergency changes," something interesting happens.

"How soon can we get started?"

That's the moment when years of accumulated frustration finally have an outlet. All those awkward audit meetings, all those emergency firewall changes, all those "you're doing it wrong" conversations suddenly become unnecessary.

The awkward silence in audit meetings doesn't have to be normal.

Security teams deserve vendors who understand that compromising security to use security products makes no sense. They deserve solutions built around their constraints, not solutions that force them to compromise their principles.

The industry won't change until customers stop accepting these compromises as inevitable. Until they realize that vendor manipulation isn't their fault.

It's time to demand better. Your security depends on it.