Digital transformation is a journey, not a destination, and modern businesses must continuously transform to keep pace with the ever-evolving IT and security market landscapes to ensure success. In a hybrid working environment, organisations must underpin their operations with an architecture that’s as flexible and agile as its ways of working. Consequently, business leaders increasingly turn to hybrid network architectures to improve productivity without sacrificing security.

Flexible working environments that empower employees to work from anywhere are essential for organisations looking to attract and retain talent. However, they also pose multiple security risks due to applications being spread across disparate cloud and Software-as-a-Service environments. As such, traditional network architecture is no longer reliable enough for modern businesses and is being superseded by hybrid architecture.

Fortunately, new, flexible hybrid architectures can benefit both employees and their organisation by delivering a secure working environment that lets users operate seamlessly from anywhere without exposing the business to cybersecurity risks.

For the best results, it’s important that organisations invest in secure solutions that bolster their protections against malicious threat actors without impeding on productivity or creating negative employee experiences. There are three ways businesses can successfully secure their hybrid architectures while protecting productivity:

1. Prioritise integration: in the modern world, security should never be an afterthought. It’s critical that security is prioritised from the beginning and that solutions are carefully integrated to eliminate potential gaps in the network. Networking and security should work in tandem, combined with a zero trust network access model, to deliver a unified security framework that covers the entire attack surface.
2. Simplify, centralise, and automate: the use of multiple tools, technologies, and processes creates challenges for users and organisations alike, both in terms of security and productivity. It’s essential to eliminate network complexity by reducing the number of platforms and applications that need to be manually managed and configured. Investing in a unified architecture with integrated security, underpinned by automation, can help to simplify hybrid network architecture and operations from end-to-end.
3. Deploy digital experience monitoring: the employee experience should be carefully considered alongside security protections to ensure one doesn’t impact the other negatively. Complicated security processes can result in users stepping outside of the secure framework to simplify their operations, which introduces risk. Investing in digital experience monitoring lets businesses achieve visibility into the employee experience and resolve issues before users are impacted.

Modern ways of working require modern solutions. Organisations that fail to adapt their security and underlying network architecture alongside their physical working environment will expose their company to vulnerabilities. It’s critical that business leaders consider their employees and security solutions in tandem to achieve the best possible results without sacrificing one for the other.

People can be an organisation’s biggest asset; however, they can also be its weakest link, so it’s crucial to ensure they are empowered and protected at the same time to ensure productivity, and security, from anywhere. Today’s hybrid working environment must be underpinned by a hybrid network architecture.