The business world has changed a lot over the past few years. In the not-so-distant past, remote working was seen as a luxury perk, offered only to a lucky few in senior management. Today, team members across all business functions connect from their kitchen tables and neighborhood cafes while waiting to board cross-country flights.
Because of this, your applications don’t just live in your data center; they’re spread across multiple clouds. This means your data constantly moves between devices, networks, and environments you don’t have full control over.
This new reality brings a wide range of opportunities, but it also exposes your business to new risks that traditional security approaches simply aren’t built to handle. In other words, the old model of protecting a clear and rigid network perimeter becomes less effective when that perimeter has essentially dissolved.
This means that today’s businesses need security that works wherever business happens. But most importantly, it needs to provide this security without slowing down your team or creating unnecessary barriers.
Highlighting the New Threats that Come With Remote Work
“Going to work” meant physically being at work (whether in an office, factory, etc.). Today, many companies exist wherever their employees are, and they’re everywhere. This shift brings incredible flexibility and productivity gains, but it also creates security blind spots:
- Remote workers connecting through unsecured networks
- Company data accessed from personal devices
- Critical applications hosted across multiple clouds
- Partners and vendors needing selective access to your systems
The old centralised security model worked when everything lived in your data center, but now it creates friction, slows business, and still leaves gaps in protection. Now, let’s take a look at some of the ways companies can secure their networks.
Enterprise VPNs: Proven Security That Still Delivers
Let’s talk about enterprise VPNs for a moment. Despite all the newer security options out there (which we will come to later), VPNs continue to play a significant role in many security strategies, and for good reason.
Think of an enterprise VPN as a private tunnel through the public internet. Your team’s data travels through these encrypted pathways, keeping sensitive information safe from prying eyes, whether someone’s working from home, a busy cafe, or a packed airport lounge.
There are several different types of VPN you can use to give your data the best level of protection. Site-to-site VPNs connect your actual locations together, while remote-access VPNs allow individual employees to connect from anywhere. Many businesses need both, creating what’s called a hybrid VPN setup.
What makes modern enterprise VPNs valuable isn’t just strong encryption (though that’s certainly important). It’s their flexibility. You can deploy them on your hardware, host them in the cloud, or mix both approaches to match your existing systems.
Zero Trust: Security Based on Verification, Not Location
Traditional security primarily assumes that you could be trusted if you were inside the company network. But what happens when an employee’s account gets compromised? Or what about when a contractor has broader access than they need to carry out their work? Or when malware makes it past your perimeter defenses and is free to run riot with full permissions?
This is exactly the problem zero trust addresses. It starts with a simple principle: never trust, always verify.
Instead of trusting anything already inside the network, zero trust treats every access request as potentially hostile, whether it comes from inside your office or the other side of the world.
This approach works well with the borderless business world of today. Here’s a brief look at how it works:
- Every user, device, and connection is verified before access is granted
- Access is limited to only what’s needed for specific tasks
- Continuous monitoring watches for suspicious behavior
- Authentication happens continuously, not just at login
The idea is that it doesn’t depend on where someone is physically located. The same verification processes apply whether someone’s at headquarters or working from a vacation rental halfway around the world.
SASE: Bringing Network and Security Together
As your applications move to the cloud and your team continues to scatter geographically, a frustrating problem emerges: your security tools and your network connections quickly become separate. This means that they are often managed separately and sometimes work against each other.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) tackles this challenge by combining network connectivity and security functions into a unified, cloud-delivered service. With SASE, security policies follow your users, not your network edge. This gives you:
Consistent protection: Apply the same security regardless of user location or device.
Reduced complexity: Consolidate multiple security products into a unified service.
Better performance: Direct cloud access without backhauling traffic through data centers.
Simplified management: Central policy control across all access points.
Simply put, SASE isn’t a single product you plug and play. It’s an architecture combining multiple technologies (such as SD-WAN, cloud security gateways, zero trust controls, and threat protection) delivered as a unified service.
Suppose your business is already heavily invested in cloud services and supporting remote teams. In that case, it’s worth looking into SASE to reduce the complexity of managing separate security tools while maintaining strong protection everywhere.
Cloud Access Security Brokers: Gaining Visibility Into Your Cloud Usage
You probably have dozens of cloud services in use across your organisation right now, some of which you may have officially adopted and signed off on, and others that employees started using on their own without getting proper authorisation. The problem with the second version is that you cannot protect what you cannot see.
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) were developed specifically to address this lack of visibility. They sit between your users and cloud services, consistently monitoring these connections and applying security policies. CASBs help you:
- Discover shadow IT (cloud services used without IT approval)
- Apply consistent security policies across multiple cloud platforms
- Protect sensitive data through encryption and access controls
- Monitor for unusual user behaviors that might indicate compromised accounts
If, like many businesses today, you’re concerned about sensitive data potentially leaking through cloud services, or if you’re struggling to maintain consistent security policies across dozens of SaaS applications, CASBs can help to provide the visibility and control that traditional security tools simply can’t match.
Final Word
Remote working is here to stay, but it doesn’t come without risks. If you want to keep reaping the benefits of a borderless workforce, you need modern protections to help meet these modern threats.
In other words, your security setup needs to work everywhere your business does, without creating barriers to productivity. With the right mix of modern security approaches, you can protect your organisation no matter where your people work or your data lives.
