The Future of Hybrid Working

“To support hybrid workers,” Maor says, “it’s essential to provide them with secure and uninterrupted access to company resources from any location. This makes it necessary for remote access solutions to maintain consistent security measures and performance standards regardless of the employee’s whereabouts, while also safeguarding the remote workforce.”

Routing remote traffic to the corporate data centre for inspection can also prove challenging, resulting in increased latency and significantly affects network performance and user satisfaction. “Security protocols for remote workers should, therefore, be straightforward to implement and enforce, without compromising the user experience.”

Consistent security – ensuring consistent enforcement of security measures and policies across the entire enterprise, including remote employees – is essential, Maor comments, while resiliency is another challenge: “Remote work is often a crucial aspect of an organisation’s business continuity plan as it allows businesses to operate even in the event of disruptions to normal operations. To ensure uninterrupted operations, a security solution for remote workers should be resilient to network interruptions.”

Key requirements for remote work security

With traditional perimeter-focused security solutions now obsolete due to this new way of working and a significant percentage of an organisation’s users and IT assets sitting outside the protected network, how does an organisation provide the best protection for its environment?

“What they require is a purpose-built infrastructure designed to offer highperformance secure remote access, and advanced threat protection,” Maor explains. To create this, the key solution requirements are:

• Secure Remote Access: The use of untrusted public networks to access corporate networks and applications poses a significant risk to both remote workers and the company. This risk can lead to a range of cyber threats. As a result, businesses must provide reliable and secure remote access solutions to their remote workers to ensure seamless network connectivity and minimise the risk of security breaches.

By implementing a comprehensive and secure remote access solution that incorporates advanced threat defence, businesses can safeguard their networks and data while enabling their remote workers to stay connected and productive.

• “Cloud Security: In today’s modern workplace, the use of cloud-based business applications has become increasingly prevalent. However, it is essential to ensure the security of these cloud-based applications to prevent any potential security breaches. Traditionally, businesses have resorted to backhauling the remote worker traffic through corporate networks to inspect and enforce policies. Nonetheless, this method has been found to be inefficient, leading to a negative impact on the network’s performance and user experience. Therefore, there is a pressing need for an alternative approach to cloud security that can effectively ensure the safety of business applications without compromising network efficiency or user experience.

• “Secure Site Access: Remote access to company sites can expose organisations to a range of security threats, and traditional methods of securing access to these sites through backhauling remote workers to corporate data centres can result in slow network performance and bad user experience. As a result, businesses must explore alternative ways of securing access to company sites for remote workers that not only provide the necessary security protections but also maintain the efficiency of the company’s website.

• “Advanced Threat Protection: In today’s increasingly digital world, companies often utilise advanced threat protection such as next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) and other similar solutions to safeguard their network perimeters.

It is imperative for organisations to adopt comprehensive advanced threat protection solutions that provide robust security coverage for remote workers as well as on-premises systems to help combat cyber threats.”

Change your infrastructure to SASE

“When we talk about the need for a purpose-built infrastructure, there’s one solution that fits the bill: Secure Access Service Edge (SASE),” comments Maor.

First coined by Gartner in 2019, SASE delivers converged network and security as a service capabilities, including SD-WAN, SWG, CASB, NGFW and zero trust network access.

“SASE is a cloud-based solution that integrates network and security functionalities, providing organisations with a robust and consistent security framework for their entire workforce,” Maor adds. “This amalgamation ensures that network traffic is securely inspected while in transit to its destination, with a minimal performance impact.

Moreover, deploying SASE in the cloud enhances the availability, scalability, and resilience of an organisation’s security architecture while maintaining consistent policy enforcement.

“The evolution of the hybrid and remote workforce is dictating how organisations think and work, which is having serious implications for access strategies, networking, and security,” concludes Maor. “If planned correctly and with the use of effective technology, this new way of working does not have to disrupt the business at all.”