By Vishal Salvi, Senior Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer and Head of the Cyber Security Practice at Infosys

Now that the pandemic appears to be receding from crisis levels, there is a clear push to return to normal in the workplace. But while many organizations are pulling back from the full work-from-home model that arose during the contagion, this is unlikely to result in a complete return to the workplace.

Instead, a new hybrid model is emerging in which workers divide their time between home and office to varying degrees. Perhaps more significant, however, is the fact that for the most part productivity remained consistent, or even improved, thanks to new generations of remote collaboration tools.

Safe and Secure

But this new model of working is not without its challenges, particularly in areas like data protection and security. When workers are no longer connecting to enterprise data from within the firewall, new measures must be taken in order to maintain existing security and compliance requirements.

Chief among these are Zero-Trust access and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architectures. Working in tandem, these two approaches offer the best protection for distributed IT environments while also accelerating digital transformation and the implementation of cloud-first infrastructure.

The key to their effectiveness lies in the way they both address two key issues in a coordinated fashion. Zero-Trust allows security policies to extend all the way to the user device rather than simply the data environment in general. Using multi-factor authentication and other tools, Zero-Trust allows access to be established using multiple pre-set parameters, such as data, time, location and device. This allows continuous security controls to be maintained within and outside a traditional firewall, basically embedding them into workloads wherever they go.

Meanwhile, SASE works to minimize the friction between network and security protocols that arise as the enterprise data footprint becomes increasingly dependent on cloud infrastructure. This provides uniform protection across the entire data footprint, integrating Zero-Trust with other security measures like secure web gateways and cloud access security brokers.

This greatly simplifies the security management burdens for the IT staff and allows them to build and deploy policies based on the applications that provide the most optimal user experience. In fact, under this architecture, users are able to access applications directly, so as not to expose the enterprise network to attack. At the same time, this eliminates much of the backhaul traffic that adds latency to the network as it encounters centralized network security controls.

For a hybrid workforce to maintain peak productivity, this is essential, particularly when knowledge workers become reliant on globally distributed architectures. One key capability is the power to microsegment enterprise IT assets using remote policies. This provides real-time access on an as-needed basis, while also reducing the time spent fixing trouble tickets and increasing the ability to optimize resources for digital transformation.

Network Simplicity

Equally important is the way SASE streamlines overall network architectures. Once in place, SASE allows the enterprise to do away with costly on-premises solutions like firewall, proxy and VPN gateways, and it greatly simplifies WAN and MPLS deployments. This enhances the speed at which new network architectures can be established and heightens the flexibility to customize them for peak operational performance for both general-purpose and highly specialized applications.

As the digital economy evolves, organizations will be tasked with providing the highest levels of data access to the workforce in order to extract the greatest value from data, infrastructure and individuals. But without the proper security and compliance tools, this will all be in vain since the economic costs of data theft and malware is incalculable - both in terms of direct financial loss and the loss of brand trust and credibility.

Implementing Zero-Trust and SASE puts the enterprise on a secure footing as it transitions into a cloud-first, digitally focused entity, but this heightened security cannot be treated as an afterthought as security measures were in previous generations. It must be incorporated into this new environment right from the start, as a core asset.

In this way, organizations will know that their data and resources remain protected no matter where the workforce is located.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vishal Salvi is Senior Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer and Head of the Cyber Security Practice at Infosys. He is responsible for the overall information and cyber security strategy and its implementation across Infosys Group. He is additionally responsible for the Cyber Security Business Delivery, driving security strategy, delivery, business and operations enabling enterprises security and improving their overall posture.