Chief information security officers heading into 2027 budget season face a sharper question than usual: not just what a security tool blocks, but what it costs to run, and what it returns. AppGate, a company focused on secure access and fraud protection, is pressing that case on two fronts at once - the hidden economics of legacy network access, and a fast-growing form of fraud built on impersonating company executives online.
Beyond the License Fee
Older remote-access technologies, including traditional VPN architectures, were not built with cloud applications, remote work, or today's volume of third-party connections in mind. Keeping them running often means dedicated hardware, specialized administrators, and constant troubleshooting - costs that rarely appear on the invoice but show up in IT budgets and in the hours employees lose waiting for access to work properly. A Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting for AppGate puts figures to that gap: organizations adopting AppGate's Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solutions saw US$17.1 million in benefits against US$5.5 million in costs over three years, a 210% return on investment with payback in under six months.
Zero Trust Network Access works on a different premise than older perimeter-based security. Instead of granting broad access once a user is inside the network, it verifies identity and context continuously and grants access only to the specific resource required, not the entire network. That narrower approach reduces the pathways available to an attacker who compromises a single credential, and according to the study it also cuts the operational load of managing access by half, freeing technical staff for other work. Roughly US$4.2 million of the benefit came from reduced infrastructure and network management costs, and US$4.1 million from gains in user productivity.
"When reviewing their cybersecurity budget, organizations should look beyond the cost of a license and reassess the effectiveness of their current tools," says Daniel Pérez, Director of Sales for Latin America at AppGate. "When those costs are factored into the equation, the conversation shifts from how much it costs to protect the organization to how much value that investment can generate."
Industry-Specific Pressure Points
The calculation differs by sector. In manufacturing and operational technology environments, secure remote access has to serve employees, contractors, and suppliers without putting industrial systems at risk of downtime. According to Pérez, access architecture in these settings needs to align with industrial security frameworks, offer encrypted and direct connections to approved resources, keep industrial assets off the public internet, and apply granular controls to outside parties without adding latency that could disrupt operations.
Healthcare organizations face a comparable balancing act: clinicians and external partners need fast access to sensitive systems, but every additional access point is a potential exposure. AppGate says its ZTNA solutions can reduce exposure to breach-related losses by 80% while easing administrative overhead. For large enterprises undergoing mergers or expansion, the Forrester study found that time to integrate an acquired company or open a new site fell by 90%, generating more than US$3 million in present value over three years - a reminder that access architecture can shape how fast a business grows, not just how well it is defended.
When Executives Become the Target
A separate but related risk has emerged outside the corporate network entirely: the impersonation of senior executives on social media. Public profiles, professional histories, photographs, and business relationships give cybercriminals raw material to build convincing fake identities, which are then used to contact customers, employees, partners, or investors under false pretenses.
Data from the Anti-Phishing Working Group's 2026 report shows impersonation accounted for 43.8% of confirmed social media threats in the first quarter of 2026, the largest single category identified. Threats detected on LinkedIn rose 130% between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, and 51% of security teams reported experiencing an executive impersonation attack in 2024.
"High-profile executives are the source of a vast amount of public information that can be used to create increasingly convincing fake identities," says Manuel Giraldo, Senior Manager of Fraud Prevention for Latin America at AppGate. "This impersonation does not stop at a fake account: it can be used to build trust with customers, employees, or partners and turn that identity into the first step in a fraud scheme."
Monitoring the Open Web
AppGate's response is VIP Impersonation Protection, a new capability within its 360 Brand Guardian offering. It continuously scans LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok for profiles that may be impersonating registered executives, analyzing signals such as names, job titles, photographs, and claimed corporate affiliations. Suspected cases go to analysts at AppGate's Guardian Fusion Center for review, and confirmed impersonations trigger a takedown request to the platform involved.
The company's own Fraud Beat report found unauthorized use of registered trademarks rose 53% year over year in 2025, a trend it links to generative AI tools that make fabricated profiles and images easier to produce convincingly. Internal controls such as authentication and behavioral analytics remain essential, but they only catch threats once they reach a company's own systems. External monitoring is meant to catch the impersonation earlier - before a fake identity ever reaches a customer or employee. "The protection of a high-profile identity requires going beyond identifying whether an account has a similar name or photograph," Giraldo says. "It is necessary to monitor continuously, investigate signals that may indicate impersonation and act when there is evidence of a threat."
