User experience wins out over security

While security is clearly a concern for IT professionals, providing the best application experience is more important, with 87 percent saying that security will need to better support the user experience.

This is among the findings of a new study of IT decision makers from Menlo Security, which shows slow access speeds (46 percent), poor connectivity (33 percent), no/ loss of access to resources (28 percent), downtime (27 percent) and decreased productivity due to increased security (27 percent) are all experience-related issues cited by respondents.

The shift to remote access is driving change too, with 80 percent of respondents saying they will likely have to support a hybrid IT model to accommodate a home office-work balance and 77 percent saying they need to rethink VPN and remote access in the immediate future

The old problems haven't gone away though. Nearly two-thirds continue to face email and web-based threats, while 40 percent face threats from cloud applications and IoT environments

"As businesses of all sizes continue to embrace remote working in 2021, organizations need to focus on providing consistent security services throughout the network -- from the hardened data center to the unsecure edge," writes Mehul Patel is Menlo Security's director of product marketing on the company’s blog. "Isolation will help you do that, delivering seamless protection at scale to wherever you do business. In 2021, the way we work can be both accessible and secure, and there's no need to compromise the user experience to keep users, devices, and the organization safe from malicious actors."

You can find out more and get the full report on the Menlo Security blog.

Photo Credit: Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock