If you’ve ever tried to get a cyber range for your program, you already know how this goes. You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have it custom, but you have to pick two because the third one always suffers. This doesn’t mean that you’re missing something, it’s just how the economics have always worked, and understanding why helps explain the frustration.
Fast and custom means expensive
When you need something built to your specifications and you need it soon, that means hiring a team or paying a vendor, and neither option is cheap. Skilled range engineers and DevOps people run six figures each, so getting three or four of them working for a few months can quickly push labor costs into the hundreds of thousands before you buy a single server. Vendor contracts for custom work start in the tens of thousands and climb fast for anything complex.
Even with the budget, you still hit bottlenecks because there are only so many people who can work on the same environment at once. Money helps, but it can never make the work instant.
Fast and cheap means generic
When you need something quickly and you can’t spend that kind of money, you buy off the shelf. Pre-built platforms are ready to go and cost a fraction of custom development, but the problem is that you get what they built rather than what you actually need.
If your curriculum requires something outside their catalog, you either reshape your training to fit their platform or accept that the environment won’t quite match what you’re trying to teach. This works fine when your needs happen to align with what vendors already offer, but when they don’t, you end up adapting your teaching to fit their product, which is backwards.
Custom and cheap means slow
When you need something specific and you don’t have the budget for a big team, you build it yourself with whoever is available. A small team can eventually produce exactly what you need, but the problem is time.
A small range takes two to four months while a serious environment with multiple scenarios can take six months to a year. That’s six months where training isn’t happening and the threats you’re preparing for keep evolving. Even after you finish, you hit ongoing bottlenecks because when something new comes out and you want to train on it, you can’t just spin up a new environment. By the time the range is ready, the moment has passed.
Why there’s no middle option
Building any custom range requires the same expertise regardless of size, including networking, virtualization, deployment, and scenario development. That knowledge takes years to develop and commands a premium because it’s rare.
As long as building a range means hiring that expertise or becoming an expert yourself, the floor stays high. Simple needs pay prices set by complex needs, and there’s no middle path because the labor model doesn’t allow for one.
How ArkOne changes this
ArkOne breaks the trilemma by putting the expertise into the platform instead of requiring you to hire it.
For fast and custom, ArkOne makes it cheap because you describe what you need and the platform generates it. No specialists, no vendor contracts, and one person with basic knowledge gets the same output that used to require a DevSecOps engineer.
For fast and cheap, ArkOne makes it custom because you’re not adapting to someone else’s catalog. You write the prompt and you get what you asked for, and if it’s not right, you edit or regenerate until it matches your objectives.
For custom and cheap, ArkOne makes it fast because the AI does the building for you. Even if the output needs editing, you’re starting from a working architecture instead of a blank page, which means what used to take months now takes minutes.
The trilemma exists because expertise has always been the bottleneck. When the platform holds the expertise, all three become possible.
— The Black Ark Labs Team
ArkOne lets you describe a cyber range and generate it. Learn more at blackarklabs.com.