Along with bringing new hope, the New Year is also a time for reflection, wherein everyone has a glance back on the gone year in conjunction with establishing expectations from the coming year. The year 2020 was extremely challenging in several ways that caused difficulty in identifying the positive and happy moments. In line with this, there are two major aspects of 2020 that people will enjoy the most viz spending full time with their family members and the progression in technology that allowed all the working professionals to shift their work culture to permanent “work from home”, from the physical corporate offices. The global pandemic also resulted in an increased movement towards the digital transformation, that demanded the IT and cybersecurity teams to make sure that their resources and infrastructure were always available 24×7 for the employees working remotely. Furthermore, these changes seem to be permanent. We will discuss here the concept of a Hybrid Workforce.
Hybrid Workforce seems to be the new norm in the coming years. This is identified based on several polls that depict that the way people work and conduct business has gone through a good change. The latest Pew Research Poll has cited that out of all the people interviewed, 90% have no interest in going back to the office that too full time. The 90% also say that they might not go to office even once, even after COVID-19 is eradicated. It is also expected by a huge number of IT decision-makers that remote work will stay in place for a very long time, maybe permanent.
The New Hybrid Workforce
The New Year has brought in the concept of a Hybrid Workforce that has soon become the new normal. This has constrained organizations to retool their systems administration and security frameworks to ensure 24X7 access to the company’s resources and provide an ideal user experience to their distant workforce. In any case, there is an urgency to help all these new remote representatives and better approaches for working together have uncovered critical limits in the legacy frameworks. There is a combination of point-product solutions and legacy systems, which is used for addressing the premises-based prerequisites; however, these are not enough for the new hybrid workforce. Another model is needed to safely empower the present progressively remote workforce, one that conveys steady security in combination with an ideal experience, irrespective of the user’s location and access data.
SASE in Cloud Is Securing the Present Day Hybrid Workforce!
With the progression of the Remote and Hybrid Workforce, organizations have been forced to implement more technologies to secure the data and provide seamless access to remote workers. The IBM’s recent Cyber Resilient Organization Report cites that organizations running on an average of 45 security solutions have seen a decrease in their ability by 13% in the past year. This has resulted in an average of $3.86 million per incident of a successful data breach. In the current times, enterprises require all-inclusive solutions that not only extend to LAN, data center, WAN, & cloud edges but also deliver security to appliances outside the network such as home offices and remote workers. This is important because remote workers have always been a weak link.
In today’s time, what is required is the capacity to extend the on-premise security functionality on all the weak links. This is possible with a flexible and secure SD-WAN solution at the branch edge or implementing a cloud-based solution. This is possible by implementing the same security platform in the cloud as SASE technology.
Development of SASE was done to make up for security lagging by SD-WAN solutions. Such solutions are suitable for branch offices, retail outlets, and a few corporate super users, however, their effectiveness diminishes when thousands of workers of an enterprise are involved, as their data, applications, workflows, and transactions require protection. For remote and hybrid workforce, SASE in the cloud provides security by enabling remote workers in the development of direct and secure connections to the services as well as applications. This is a better solution than every user being required to make a VPN tunnel back to the corporate network, which is then, required to backhaul the entire traffic out to cloud-based apps & other services and back.
When the security is provided as a part of cloud SASE service, then it means that everything runs on the same platform as well as a common operating system. This helps in ascertaining that all the remote workers get the same security and protection, along with other features of traffic inspection, and threat detection. This is a direct benefit for the security administrators, who are responsible for centrally deploying and managing the policies, along with collecting and equating threat intelligence for the detection of threats. This further ascertains seamless configurations and policy enforcement in conjunction with coordinating threat responses throughout the network, irrespective of their local and apps access. This type of strategy involves working together with security tools for increasing visibility and control. It also assists in assuring a suitable security framework to lend support to upcoming digital innovation. For a Remote and Hybrid Workforce, cloud-based security solutions result in utmost protection on every device of every user, irrespective of their location or how they make, access, share, or store data. This is the only way to ensure the secure and seamless working of our new digital world.
CloudCodes – The Name You Can Trust!
Turn to CloudCodes for the most effective cloud security solutions! It has transformed networking and security to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive cloud-native SASE – a Secure Access Services Edge – a term coined by Gartner. It allows the companies to easily support the dynamic secure access needs of their hybrid workforce. Get associated with the team here and get valuable insights on how to enable today’s work-from-anywhere workforce along with achieving consistent security with an optimal user experience for all users and locations. The director of product marketing at CloudCodes has many years of networking and security industry experience. In his current role, he is responsible for the SASE security portfolio.