Orgs Struggling to Balance Security and End-User Experience
A survey of 503 IT professionals conducted by the market research firm Dimensional Insight on behalf of Broadcom Software highlighted the degree to which organizations are struggling to balance security against customer experience. The survey found more than half of respondents (54%) prioritize security over the end-user experience. However, 46% also conceded they have bypassed security to improve user experiences.
Matt Stevens, head of network observability for the Agile Operations division at Broadcom, said the survey suggested that rather than treating security as an afterthought, more organizations are trying to strike a balance. Overall, there’s now a much greater appreciation for security but challenges remain when it comes to making sure security doesn’t add too much friction to the user experience, he said.
In fact, a full 92% of respondents said monitoring the impact of security solutions on user experiences is critical, and 68% noted it’s important to monitor network security within the context of the entire system.
Respondents cited hybrid workers (44%), third-party networks and internet service providers (ISPs) (43%) and public cloud resources (41%) as the biggest impediments to full visibility. About a quarter also noted that zero-trust security initiatives (26%) and secure access service edge (SASE) platforms (23%) contributed to the problem.
Nevertheless, 97% of respondents said they planned to deploy zero-trust technologies and platforms, while 96% said they planned to adopt SASE. A total of 91% said having visibility into the user experience is key for successfully adopting SASE.
The ability to monitor users when working remotely (55%), easy deployment (53%), integration with network security solutions (51%) and scalability (51%) were all cited as required capabilities.
The challenge is that those initiatives will span both cloud and on-premises IT environments, with 83% of respondents working for organizations that still employ a hybrid approach to network security.
In general, organizations are moving toward converging security and network management as much as possible as IT environments become more distributed. More workloads than ever are running in the cloud, but the bulk of most workloads in the enterprise are still running in on-premises IT environments. The issue IT organizations regularly encounter is finding a way to securely provide access to those applications without making the application experience either too complex or slowing down the overall application experience. The more applications that are accessed across a wide area network (WAN), the more challenging the application experience as more latency is introduced into the application environment.
In fact, one reason organizations are investing more in SASE platforms is to eliminate the need to backhaul network traffic from cloud applications through a data center managed by an internal IT team. That approach eliminates much of the latency that can adversely impact the performance of cloud applications.
Regardless of how applications are accessed, it’s apparent cybersecurity teams now have a seat at the proverbial table. The goal should be to enable organizations to securely access applications rather than simply denying access entirely.
