The post-COVID era also marked the beginning of the transition to a remote and hybrid workforce. According to ESG Research, almost 75% of enterprises expect to support at least 25 remote locations over the next two years. Among American companies, 48% of employees want to continue working from home at least in a partial capacity. Similarly, 62% of employees still prefer the hybrid working model - or entirely from their homes.
Additionally, remote workers prefer to use their personal devices - with virtually non-existent access control. As the focus shifts to cybersecurity, 73% of business executives view remote workers as a security risk. Hence, companies are adopting the Secure Access Service Edge or SASE model to secure their remote and hybrid workforce.
In this blog, let's discuss the various security-related challenges in remote and hybrid working models - and how to overcome them using SASE.
The 2020 global pandemic accelerated the shift towards remote and hybrid working models. Most organizations tried optimizing their existing infrastructure to facilitate remote workers. However, these short-term security approaches were insufficient when scaling up remote working.
Organizations continue to rely on “piecemeal” security tools from multiple vendors - or virtual private networks (VPNs) to enable authorized access to their employees. The problem arose when moving sensitive data from the employee's device through the VPN connection. The rate of ransomware attacks increased by 500%.
Without zero trust security, organizations had limited control and visibility into data and online threats. To add to the complexity, most companies had a host of over 2,400 SaaS applications on average. By 2025, Gartner estimates that 95% of digital workloads will be deployed on the cloud. This makes it all the more challenging for IT teams to secure their enterprise workloads.
User identity is the new security parameter - to control access to sensitive data and workloads. Thus, organizations need an identity-driven security framework like SASE for its hybrid or remote workforce.
How SASE Can Overcome Security Challenges in Remote and Hybrid WorkforceIn 2019, Gartner defined the SASE framework as a cloud-based architecture designed to deliver network and security services to protect data, users, and applications.
SASE technology is designed to address the security-related challenges in hybrid and remote working environments. Along with its wide area network (WAN) capabilities, SASE brings a host of security-related capabilities including:
Here's what makes SASE the best security solution for remote and hybrid workforces:
By integrating SASE with Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA), organizations can now provide access control to applications and data at a granular level. SASE serves as the single platform to manage all access requests (irrespective of their original location) to all hosted applications and data. With ZTNA, organizations have a reliable zero-trust approach to security, which means every access request must be authorized and verified before being granted access.
With this integrated approach, organizations can avail of the following benefits:
As organizations move towards a cloud-powered parameter-less framework for hybrid work models, these SASE capabilities gain even more importance.
Challenges in SASE implementationDespite the benefits, enterprises face a lot of challenges in SASE implementation. Here are some of the major challenges - and how to address them:
As a relatively new technology, a SASE solution can disrupt traditional network infrastructures - and also compromise productivity. Before implementing SASE, companies an efficient change management strategy to:
For proper SASE implementation, companies must choose from a host of SASE solution providers. Besides, companies must ensure that their offered SASE solution fits their business needs and environment. Solution providers offer a variety of networking and security technologies - as part of their SASE solution. Some of them offer networking tools - while others specialize in security tools. Hence, choosing the right technology partner is a challenge for most organizations.
SASE implementation requires the alignment of both networking and security teams. Unfortunately, in most organizations, these teams work in silos and are not integrated. For a unified cloud-based SASE platform, these internal teams must work closely - and collaborate on change management strategies, policy management, and network bandwidth performance.
The SASE framework comprises multiple tools and technologies like CASB, ZTNA, and SWG. A comprehensive SASE environment requires integrating these tools, which is a major challenge. Besides that, the existing security and network ecosystem may not be compatible with every SASE component. To address this challenge, organizations need a single technology partner providing an all-in-one SASE solution.
As more companies switch to remote and hybrid working, they need SASE technology to secure their applications and elevate the user experience.
The Incrux team has extensive industry experience in security solutions. Contact us today to discuss endpoint security!