Workspaces: Secure access anytime, anywhere

Digital companies went from having a circumstantial hybrid workforce (due to confinement) to one designed for convenience. Learning in recent times added new management and leadership styles, which significantly boosted innovation and productivity. 

But how do we maintain this over time? While generating a good digital employee experience involves addressing notions of agility and flexibility, information security seems to be at the other end, more associated with barriers and access controls. 

Although there is a growing threat landscape, technology required to protect the company's most valuable asset also exists, which is its information, while optimizing the experience of using the entire team. Digital and remote work is characterized by its dynamism and high competitiveness, so to understand current needs it is important to review the current context and understand the possibilities available to us. 

Hybrid and Distributed Work

Analysts say that many of the jobs that until recently were face-to-face will not go back to the offices every working day, for which companies must continue learning to take advantage of this gained digital boost.42% of employees from all over the world say that working remotely is a requirement, not just an advantage and 90% consider it the responsibility of the employer to ensure adequate access to digital tools to make remote working possible. In addition, the facts corroborate that the size of the global market for digital workspaces continues to increase.

And in recent years, even geographical dispersion and multiplicity of origins within the same work team have been added, because the recruitment of talent from companies no longer considers geographical location as a requirement or impediment.  

In this scenario, although new talents prefer remote or hybrid work, and in practice it is carried out, there are numbers that alert us that there is still work to be done. In terms of digitization, today it is essential to understand the needs and experience of employees, because this good or bad experience is also transmitted to the customer. In terms of digitization, today it is essential to understand the needs and experience of employees, because this good or bad experience is also transmitted to the customer.

Safe spaces: distrust or constant review?

Today IT specialists need to manage and optimize secure access to any application, in any cloud and from any device. That is why the concept of Zero Trust access to the network arises, in reference to the reinforcement of security with automated control patterns for access to information.

It is a concept that is based on three principles: zero trust, fewer privileges and constant verification. On those pillars, a reliable control model is built that, at the same time, provides flexibility, agility and scalability to companies of any size. 

In practice, Zero Trust is a model that requires the identity of the user and multiple factors that account for their contextualization, to authorize or not their access, preventing any attack that simulates being part of the team to enter internal resources. 

This allows comparative advantages such as:  

• Effective identity and context-based access for all applications
• Software-defined security that protects remote users, devices, and data without impacting performance or user experience.
• Independence from legacy security tools that are not scalable and make the whole process slower.
• Extension of a global security perimeter network, to adapt it to each need, making a qualitative leap and leaving behind VPNs and their characteristic slowness

These are solutions created especially for the Digital Workspace which are cloud-based and provide quality assurance to applications and operational simplicity. The key is to implement and combine tools that provide more secure, optimized and high-performance access from the outset, for all platforms. 

Today we can say that the conditions are in place to move away from traditional security and operational solutions and integrate alternatives that guarantee:  

• A unified terminal management  

• Security systems that prevent, detect and respond to threats 
• Audit and remediation that consistently measure behavior to protect against ransomware and malware. 
• IT team that follows up and monitors to ensure compliance and operation of security updates. 

It's time to leave old practices behind. Although companies shoulder the fears they carry from the first steps in digitization, today the advance of security alternatives for digital spaces makes a total paradigm shift possible, making security a fundamental premise and value that sustains business and guarantees the dynamics and needs of work teams.