Page 37 - Cyber Defense eMagazine February 2024

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• IT no longer controls where and how users connect to enterprise applications – making it harder
than ever to impose a security perimeter
• While out-of-office work has increased exponentially, security and networking teams have
expanded incrementally, if at all. Their workload has risen accordingly, as has mean time to
resolution of issues
• The nature of security threats and the tactics needed to address them are changing.

Security is only half the picture. Exclusively focusing on security can obscure what IT is there to do, which
is to improve the productivity of staff, the experience of users and customers, and the profitability of the
enterprise.

Ensuring the security of your organization should not come at the cost of a subpar IT experience or hinder
your users' ability to perform as well as with their office-bound peers.

Cloudbrink believes that maintaining security and quality of experience in all corners of the hybrid
workplace is one of the major challenges facing enterprises in 2024.

While most of the attention is on the security challenges, users connecting to the enterprise via Wi-Fi,
4G/5G and consumer grade broadband face numerous network reliability and performance issues that
can severely compromise user experience and productivity. Unresolved connectivity problems can
undermine morale, jeopardize employee retention, diminish customer service quality, and ultimately
threaten security as users seek alternative solutions to bypass difficult IT systems.

Don’t take our word for it. Last year the analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) polled
354 IT pros including CIOs, CISOs, and networking and security teams.

The research concluded that:

• Less than a third of enterprises (32%) believe they have fully succeeded in providing parity of
experience to users in and out of the office.
• The siloed structure of IT organizations results in security and networking teams each following
their own agenda. Security is usually the higher priority with security teams typically taking a lead
role in shaping how remote users connect to the enterprise.
• Respondents typically saw security and performance as a trade-off: you can have one or the
other, but not both. 46% admitted that they prioritize security over performance while only 34%
try to optimize both.
• Most of the solutions deployed for secure application access, including VPN, ZTNA, SD-WAN
and SASE incurred performance and other overheads. For instance, SD-WAN solutions for home
users typically involve uprated network connections and – in nearly three-quarters of cases –
hardware rollouts.
• VPN was the most used solution, deployed by 61% of enterprises, but considered optimal by only
46%.

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