The Zero Trust Dividend: Turning Security Costs into Capital Savings

VMware's Rajagopalan, Thompson on Operational Burdens, Tool Fragmentation Tom Field (SecurityEditor) • April 15, 2026

As enterprises rethink cybersecurity for the cloud era, rigid, appliance-heavy security models are quickly turning from necessary investments into costly liabilities.

Traditional security architectures - built on oversized hardware, fragmented tools and centralized inspection points - are driving up both capital and operational expenses while slowing organizations down. These legacy approaches force companies to overprovision for peak demand, resulting in chronically underutilized infrastructure, while also creating complex, siloed environments that require significant manual effort to manage, integrate and scale.

Ranga Rajagopalan, field CTO ANS at VMware by Broadcom, emphasized the inefficiency of hardware-centric models, noting, “If you size and buy appliances for that maximum load, what really happens is most of the time it’s running at 10, 15% utilization and just sitting there."

Joined by Herb Thompson, field CTO at VMware by Broadcom, the pair highlighted ...