The COVID-19 pandemic has indelibly changed the way we all work. As the world has opened back up and organizations have begun making the return to the office, many employees still want a hybrid work model.
In an ideal hybrid working model, employees feel empowered and more productive given the freedom to do their work from any location or device, whenever it’s most convenient. Users need fast, secure access to their data, regardless of where their applications are located. They want to be able to seamlessly transition between working with local and cloud resources at the office or at home. The user experience has to be exceptional. All of this is enabled by having converged cloud-delivered on-ramps that provide a single inspection point.
Whereas pandemic efforts were intended to be temporary fixes to maintain worker productivity and agility while reducing office and infrastructure costs, now, hybrid working is essential when it comes to retaining and attracting talent, as skill shortages run rampant across industries and workers relocate out of big cities. Additionally these transformations offer the opportunity to unleash the potential of the workforce with an improved user experience that doesn’t sacrifice security.
Even with all of these benefits in mind, and the competitive edge they provide, actually implementing the necessary capabilities for a successful hybrid workforce is still easier said than done. Many organizations are recognizing substantial architectural and technological limitations that need to be addressed in order to unlock the full potential of digital transformation and hybrid work.
Hybrid work challenges—and opportunities
The efforts that got organizations through the early days of the pandemic were mostly concentrated around quick ways to accelerate earlier programs and optimize existing technologies to let employees work remotely. However, these approaches fall short when it comes to implementing hybrid work at scale.
Even after the acceleration brought on by the pandemic, many organizations are still reliant on a patchwork of multi-vendor security appliances, as well as VPNs and MPLS tunnels that backhaul traffic—since most user traffic is destined for the internet, this makes for a dismal user experience full of network latency. Because of this, IT teams often resorted to split-tunneling and direct-to-internet workarounds to improve the user experience, putting security at risk. If you think about security when it was still on-premises, there were 12-15 different types of inspection happening, but when organizations went to work from home, and IT implemented these workarounds, inspection dropped significantly.
Plus without an underlying foundation of zero trust security, organizations are losing key visibility, as well as control, for data, threat, and risk management. Not easing matters is the fact that the average organization is using 2,415 cloud applications. And with Gartner’s prediction that 70% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services by 2023, it’s easier to understand how all of these shortcomings, combined, show potential for much bigger risks to the business.