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Empowering and Securing the Hybrid Workforce

Recent worldwide events have organization ’ s ability to secure its ’ data and environment changed in 2020 . And it didn ’ t matter if they were a small or very large company , the shift to a hybrid ( and , in some cases , completely remote ) workforce mixed with data increasingly being stored within the cloud and no longer inside the corporate network , created a recipe for a potential security disaster . The initial focus was solely placed on keeping the business operational with as much as 70 % of the workforce working remotely .

This put a strain on organizations early on in the pandemic , with IT teams struggling to accommodate all the new remote workers . Many of my customers were literally digging up old VPN Concentrator appliances from closets and using them as a stopgap measure . Organizations were doing whatever possible to stay afloat and keep the lights on . The priorities often were ( in this order ):

1 . Application Access 2 . Data Security 3 . Operational Efficiency

Application Access was obviously priority # 1 . You could not run your business if you didn ’ t have access to the underlying applications . Then you had to figure out how to secure access to these apps and the data retrieved from them . The problem was further exacerbated when some of the now-remote workers didn ’ t have a corporate laptop and were using their personal machines . The last priority , operational efficiency , is something that most organizations are still figuring out to this day as we see evolutionary changes in application usage patterns and business dynamics in the era of COVID .

20 INTELLIGENTCIO LATAM www . intelligentcio . com